Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1

by Julian Fellowes

  * At a dinner party like this one, it is still the hostess who decides in which direction her guests will talk. You hear people say you have to talk first to the right, or some such, but this is nonsense. The hostess is the decision maker. If she talks first to the man on her right, every woman talks to the man on her right. If she talks to the left, every woman talks to the left. Then or now, she will usually keep the more interesting fellow for the main course, so it’s a slight insult if she speaks to you first, but anyway, when the pudding arrives, the table breaks up and you can chat to whomever you like. This rule continues to be observed over most of England, but not in artistic circles, and a director said to me the other day how stiff it must be. In fact, he was quite wrong. One can go to a dinner in Hampstead and spend an hour in silence because both neighbours are talking in the other direction. That never happens where you observe these rules.

  * I love Mrs Patmore. I think Lesley Nicol’s performance is fantastic. She is the kitchen Violet. Maggie Smith delivers the cryptic comments upstairs, Lesley has the barbed tongue downstairs. In a sense they balance each other, as Robert and Bates, or Anna and Mary, balance each other. But I suspect Mrs Patmore is a little more soft-hearted.

  * Mrs Patmore knows that if her suspicions are correct and she is indeed going blind then her situation is very serious, as she will not be able to work. The Granthams may pension her off but it means a severe drop in income and probably intense loneliness after years spent in a loud and busy kitchen. It might not exactly be ruin, but it will be very, very bad. I think Jim and Lesley play this scene wonderfully. It always makes me cry.

  * Violet of course is irritated by the idea that she hasn’t won on merit in the past, at the same time acknowledging in this judgement that she’s aware of what has gone on. I was accused at the time of copying the scene from Mrs Miniver, where Dame May Whitty, as Lady Beldon, makes the same decision. I wasn’t conscious of it, but when I re-watched the movie not long ago, it was pretty close, so I suppose it must have been hovering in my brain. Funnily enough, I thought I was inspired by something that happened to my mother when I was growing up. We lived then in a house with the most marvellous climbing roses and we always won the prize for them, year after year, at the village flower show. Someone on the committee suggested that my parents might like to donate a cup and my mother, shamelessly really, volunteered to present a cup for the best climbing rose, knowing she would win it. So they bought a very pretty, large silver cup which I suppose my mother planned to use as the table centrepiece and they gave it to the village. Everyone was very grateful, they were thanked a hundred times, and she never won the prize again.

  * Violet, like Maggie in a way, is completely unsentimental so she would hate for anyone to think that she had read her own name and yet given the first prize to Mr Molesley out of kindness. She needs them to believe that the judges made the award, but of course no one, certainly no family member, does think that because they know that no villager would be brave enough to challenge the Dowager. I suspect one of the keys to Violet, as Maggie has developed her, is that she doesn’t need praise. It is not one of the things that motivates her. She doesn’t need approval, and in a way that is what gives her strength. Incidentally, I had written that old Mr Molesley won for a Papa Meilland rose, which was my mother’s favourite, but we learned it had not yet been launched and so I changed it to the Countess Cabarrus, a fictional flower, named after a friend.

  * The envelope is correctly addressed to SW with no number, because numbers came later.

  * This is the moment when Sybil is identified as a rebel, not just a political rebel, because I never really know how political she is, but from now on we know that she is not going to lead the life that was ordained for her. Her natural ally in the house is Branson because he is also living within a system of which he disapproves. So in that sense they are both in the same moral position of seemingly upholding values that neither of them support.

  * I always think it’s rather disheartening for an actor when you have been given, as here, pages to say in the script but you end up with only a moderate place in the finished scene. You think: Oh good, I can really do something with this. But inevitably the programme makers focus on the principal characters and you’re just banging away in the background. As an actor, I cannot tell you how disappointing it can be when you see the final edit. So Jamie de Courcey has my sympathy because I thought he was very good.

  † I won’t say Isobel is more progressive here than we have seen earlier, but by going to a meeting like this, she is making a statement. It doesn’t surprise us that she is on the side of women’s rights, most of us would have seen that coming from Episode Two when we first met her, but she is a little bit more proactive in the cause of her beliefs than we might have expected, and of course as the series progresses will become increasingly so.

  * In this scene, we begin the romance, but we don’t do much more than that. We simply hint at the fact that there is a natural sympathy between these two because they are both essentially rebelling against the respective authorities in control of them.

  * I think the problem for living-in servants was that you were in a very unrelenting situation. Especially when individuals did not get on. In many jobs there are some people you don’t much like, whether in an office or a theatre or down on the farm, but most of us go home at the end of the day and get rid of it. The living-in servants did not go home. They went upstairs. So if you were embroiled in a feud, you had no real break from it. Then the hours were so long, apart from your one day off a fortnight you were there all the time, eating together, sitting together. I’ve tried to show that this was one of the drawbacks of the life.

  * Robert has that quality of being entertained by the beliefs of his natural enemies but here, like many in the past, he comes up against the consequence of his broad-mindedness. Flirting with revolution, whether it’s a figure like Anthony Crosland, a glass of champagne in one hand and a gun in the other, or Marie Antoinette laughing at a play by Beaumarchais, is always much more dangerous than people realise. Personally, I am firmly convinced that, over the centuries, the lefty toff has done far more damage than any street revolutionary.

  * In this moment Robert is angry with Cora for allowing Sybil to go to the meeting and in Los Angeles I was attacked by a journalist for letting him speak sharply to his wife, suggesting that because Robert is a sympathetic figure he should have no faults. But nobody’s perfect, and just because a couple get short-tempered with each other does not mean there’s anything wrong with the marriage. There is a tendency in fiction to suggest that if a couple is happy there can never be a flaw, and if they’re unhappy then they’re permanently at each other’s throat. Of course, neither is true in real life.

  * Maggie Smith is so rewarding to write for because she always gets the gag and enhances it. Some actors don’t quite manage this, but she invariably makes everything funnier than it was on the page.

  † In this scene, the contrast between the conversation and the rituals of rank, between the topic of women’s rights and the footmen in attendance, suggests one of the central ironies of Downton. We start in an era which seemed graceful and ordered and peaceful, with liveried servants and men pulling their forelock as they opened the gate, but in fact all that was a veneer over a society that was preparing, if often unconsciously, for convulsive change.

  * These houses on the whole worked if the family had a good relationship with certain key members of staff, and of those the chief was the butler. He was really halfway between the staff and the family, and when you got a good one, who was really on your team, you did everything you could to hang onto him. But this friendship, as it really was in many cases, could only be prosecuted when the employer and the butler were alone. You would not usually include the butler in a conversation with your friends in the drawing room, but once you were alone, then you could enjoy a pretty equal relationship, joking, gossiping, talking things through, so there was an almost secret element
to the whole thing. It was the same with a valet or a lady’s maid. If you saw your maid in public, it would all be very respectful and does your ladyship want to wear the white or the grey tonight? But when you were in the bedroom getting dressed, then the tone of the conversation would be quite different. I hope we make that clear in the series.

  * Lord Flintshire starts off here as an unsympathetic figure, but later he grows more cuddly and by the time we meet him in the Christmas Special of the third series, we, and the Granthams, love him. Which of course is quite illogical.

  † This exchange is difficult for Cora because the relationship between the family and the servants was predicated on the family always being in the right. For Carson to know about Mary’s wrongdoings is hard. Of course, it doesn’t shake Carson’s love for her at all.

  * I am always interested by convention and this convention, of female diffidence and subservience, was universally accepted at that period. The man was the master of the house and all that nonsense. But I don’t think these rules are ever much of a guide to what went on in private. If you go back to the twelfth century there are accounts of men who were terrified of their wives. One must never forget that human nature has a way of manifesting itself whatever the customs of a particular society may be and anyway, Cora comes from a different conditioning. She is not an aristocrat even by American standards. She has new money and when we do meet her mother, Mrs Levinson is brash and loud and certainly not a Winthrop from Boston.

  * Morgan, the Liberal candidate. Named for a friend.

  * Lynch the groom raises an interesting point. You introduce these characters but you don’t really know which of them will run. And, with Downton, the more we got into it the more I realised that we couldn’t hope to cover the outside staff. The nearest to someone living and working outside the house that we had room for was the chauffeur. He is, after all, driving the family around. Originally I had ideas of gardeners and grooms and so on, but there simply isn’t the space to develop them. Every now and then the characters will refer to the groom or the head gardener, when horses are brought round or flowers are brought in, and the gamekeeper makes an appearance in the second series but the fact remains we were pushing our luck developing eighteen characters; once you go over about ten it is hard to find the space for them to have any story, so that had to be the limit really.

  * Mary’s snobbery is essentially unconscious. She doesn’t mean to hurt William’s feelings, but she cannot imagine how anyone could be bettering themselves as a second footman. She apologises, so I don’t mean to make her out to be a bitch, but I think it’s important to remember that these things were often quite differently perceived by the locals and the families. The big house was a promised land for the nearby schools. Most of the leaving class, certainly the girls, would go into service but usually it would be in more ordinary situations, where they might be maid-of-all-work to a shop keeper, which would mean the life of a dog because they had to do everything, and even if they went into a rectory with two other maids and a cook, it was a much duller life, with no status attached. But if you were chosen by the Marchioness of Exeter’s housekeeper to go and work at Burghley, or the Duchess of Richmond to go and work at Goodwood, then this was an excellent start. And if you gained a good reference, then you were on your way. So William or Daisy, far from being failures by being low in the pecking order, have in fact begun well. If the career had continued after the Second World War in the same way, then William would have ended up as a butler, perhaps in a major house.

  * Sybil lies to her father in order to go to the political meeting in Ripon, and in a way this is a moment of parturition. Once children conceal their purposes or their social engagements or their plans for the weekend, that is the beginning of their move away from the parental set of values. Before that, God knows they may be rude or challenging, but they don’t usually have a private life, a secret agenda. And this is where it begins for Sybil.

  * This scene was a slight disappointment because Gwen should have been turning down the bed for the night. It is a custom that has almost gone now, not in hotels perhaps but in most houses. Even so, when you come up after dinner and your bed has been turned down, there is nothing more luxurious. I put it in as a beguiling detail but somehow there was a misunderstanding and Gwen ended up actually making the bed at what must be quite late at night, as if it had sat there unmade all day. It doesn’t really make sense and, when I saw it, I complained like billy-o. They tried to minimise it in the edit, but they couldn’t change the action because that is what she’s doing.

  * One of the socialist arguments that I understand is the injustice of entitlement, that a child who has grown up in a prosperous middle- or upper-class household has a sense of entitlement to a certain way of life. There is an unconscious assumption, by them and their families, that they will get a job and lead a life that is reasonably similar to the one they’ve always known. And in many, many cases it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because these young men and women are comfortable with prominent people, they are at ease in the presence of money. They have no fear of success.

  But someone from an unprivileged background, even when they are brilliant and talented, can strive for a sense of belonging, the lack of which can hold them back and cheat them of maximising their potential. I am not, as it happens, a fan of the Eleven Plus exam, but one of the achievements of the grammar schools was to give this sense of entitlement to children from deprived backgrounds. So that by the time they left school and went on to university or into jobs, there really was no difference between them and people who’d gone to the greatest public schools in the country. They were all on an even playing field.

  Privileged people are often slow to understand what an advantage they have been given, because they have grown up in a world of the possible. That’s what this scene is about.

  * Should they disobey his mother’s wishes and tell William she’s on the way out, or is she entitled to control the knowledge of her own illness? In a way I agree with Isobel. If I were dying and I didn’t want my son to know for some reason or other, I would be very angry if someone disobeyed me and told him. On the other hand … Anyway, hopefully it’s one of my Downton conundrums, where you’re never quite sure which side you agree with.

  * These are friends of ours in Cheshire and Sarah Callender-Beckett was lying in bed, half-watching this episode, and half-reading her book, when suddenly Strallan announced that he was on his way to the Callender-Becketts. She nearly fainted. I’ve subjected quite a few friends to similar treatment over the years.

  * Edith seems almost to be winning for once, but I’m afraid Robert has the response which is so disappointing when you find it in a parent. He assumes Edith will be a spinster because he thinks her the least handsome of his daughters. He expects her to be the one who stays at home to look after them in their old age. Here, my sympathies are entirely with Edith. It is very draining when the people you live with assume that you’re a non-achiever and no one should have to put up with it.

  The casting of Edith was a challenge. Just as you would never cast a boring actor to play a bore, so, when you are casting a plain character, the last thing you want is a plain actress. It’s a trick, really. You need someone who is attractive but in a different way, allowing the others to act as if she were plain. This will give the audience the sensation that they can see her inner beauty. But of course they’re not looking at her inner beauty, they’re looking at her outer beauty. Laura Carmichael is just as pretty as Michelle Dockery and Jessica Brown Findlay, but she’s got that slightly more reserved English face. The characters act that she’s the least fetching of the sisters, but she isn’t. They are, all three, very beguiling.

  † Here we have Mrs Patmore demonstrating that she is the downstairs Violet.

  * The story is in the detail. The Honourable Joseph Gerald Ansty means that he is the son of a peer and so probably a member of one of the local great families. For a landowner’s son to stand for Parliament
was fairly typical. But here we also have the Socialist party canvassing almost 3,000 votes, which is a way of reminding the audience that Socialism was already becoming a force in the land. As for the numbers, this election is before universal suffrage so the polling figures would have been much smaller than today.

  * Mary is an interesting character to write because, to begin with, she has a fairly tough shell. She thinks of herself as a very superior person, she’s good-looking and intelligent and the daughter of an earl. But the leaking of the Pamuk story has made her vulnerable, and with vulnerability comes a slight opening up. We never have total meltdown because that’s just not who she is, but she is less careful, all of which Michelle mines very well.

  * We are beginning to understand that Branson has fallen for Sybil. But Mary simply doesn’t register that he has any special interest in her sister. I believe it is important in this sort of material to give characters attitudes and responses that are compatible with their own time. Some modern film-makers would allow Mary to be instantly sympathetic to the idea of a romance between her sister and the chauffeur, but that’s not really believable, given what her conditioning would have been in the world of 1914.