Conveying all this has been tricky because we wanted in a way to give a sense of the house cutting down, but at the same time we didn’t want to diminish the cast too much, or keep losing characters from below stairs but not from above. It’s been a bit of a balancing act. In real life, with a family like the Crawleys, they probably would have been down to one footman, two housemaids and no under butler, but there had to be a little bit of ‘television margin’ here.
9 The prison story was hard for Brendan Coyle (Bates) because it meant he was isolated from most of the cast. We used the exterior of Lincoln Prison, but built the interior set at Ealing Studios. While Brendan was in gaol he would see Joanne Froggatt (his wife, Anna), and in one episode the solicitor, Mr Murray, but no one else from the regular cast. It was different for Jo, because she would see other members of the cast at Highclere and Ealing. I think it was quite testing for him and must have been quite a relief when his character was set free.
We use the address book to establish Anna’s sympathies. The public is entitled to doubt Bates’s innocence, and they are given sufficient opportunities to do so, but Anna never does because that would undermine their dramatic narrative. Of course, when you say to an audience that we’ve found an address book and Anna has copied out the addresses, unless they’ve been living entirely in the jungle and have only just seen their first television, they know that there will be a name in the address book that will take them further in the story.
10 In the 1970s, we had all those American drama soaps, Dynasty and Dallas and The Colbys and so on, where there was never any explanation of why these apparently very rich families – comprising perhaps four or five married couples – would all live together in one house. In real life, one of the main points of being rich is that you have enough money to buy a house and you are not obliged to live with your parents. But that was the way with these shows, and that was what we found ourselves doing here.
I did at one point toy with the idea of giving Matthew and Mary their own house, but then I just felt we’d get into such a fix with their staff and all the rest of it that we decided against it. It doesn’t mean we don’t understand why Matthew wants to be master of his own home. He’s not hostile to his in-laws, but he would like to be alone with his wife, and, as he says here, ‘I want us to get to know each other.’
As always with Downton, in these arguments I like to feel that the audience can see both points of view. I don’t think Matthew is saying anything silly. He is going to lose, but I don’t think his position is in the least untenable. On the other hand, Mary has a sense that now she has married the heir she wants to start being part of the management of the place. She wants to pull her weight. She isn’t going to inherit, but that blow has now been softened because her husband will, and so for every reason possible she wants to stay there. Of course, she knows how to manipulate Matthew, and if she said, ‘I just want to live here,’ then that wouldn’t be a good move. But she says she only wants to live at Downton at the start, ‘So we’ve got a place to sleep after the honeymoon.’ In short, she is quite deliberately putting him in a position where his refusal starts to look stubborn, as opposed to its being fundamentally reasonable, which it is.
11 Murray, played by Jonathon Coy, my old pal, hasn’t been in Downton for a while because we haven’t had a legal problem, but I think it’s nice when you’re in a series and occasionally you have a story, which is what he has here: The Ruin of Robert Grantham. I chose the Canadian Grand Trunk Line because it was, at the time, one of the most surprising failures of that generation. To investors, as the major line in British North America, it was thought bound to succeed because of all the trade that was waiting to use it, and it was situated where you literally couldn’t lose. For these reasons, Robert has put all his money into it. But the brilliant man who ran it, Charles Hays, who really was a sort of genius, died tragically on the Titanic, and after that the line started to go down until finally, amazingly, at the beginning of the 1920s, it failed. All this is real, as any viewer who wishes to look it up on the internet will discover.
I wanted a reason why Robert would put so much money into one concern, but the fact is, it looked an absolutely copper-bottomed way of doubling or trebling your fortune, which is what Robert needs to save the estate. But doubling or even trebling will only make a difference if you invest an enormous amount, and so unfortunately that’s what Robert did. Well, fortunately for us, because then it gives us a whole new plot line for the third series. I feel very sympathetic to Robert here, when he says, ‘I won’t give in… I refuse to be the failure, the Earl who dropped the torch,’ because I know that the hardest thing for that generation – and it goes down to the present day – was to be the one who sells. It’s much less hard for their son or grandson, but when you are the one who sold the family house, or demolished it… I had a cousin who pulled down his house and built another, much smaller one. Whenever you went there he would get out his album of pictures of the old house and he’d say, ‘This is what the place used to look like.’ It was heartbreaking, really. Still, at least they hung on to the estate.
For many families, when their personal economy wasn’t working, they should have accepted the fact and done something about it, but they clung on and clung on and clung on because they didn’t want to be the one who threw in the towel. They borrowed and borrowed and went further and further off-piste, and by the time they did sell, all the money was consumed by the debt, so the family was essentially returned overnight to a perfectly ordinary middle-class existence. Surely one has to be very hard-hearted not to see that this must have been difficult. You think and hope and pray something will turn up – some uncle in Zanzibar will die and everything will be okay. But for so many, nothing did.
12 Now we revive Edith’s romance with Strallan. Again, this is all very Downton-esque. Strallan is a decent man – his reason for thinking he shouldn’t court a woman when he’s been wounded in the war and that he’s too old anyway is perfectly honourable. But Edith was part of the generation Virginia Nicholson wrote a very good book about, Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men after the First World War. There’s a picture of one of my great-aunts in it. The officer class had suffered a very high rate of death, particularly in the early years. After 1916 they took them out of officer uniforms because the Germans would pick off the officers first. After that, all the men wore the same. Someone tried to complain about this during our second series, when we showed an officer wearing a private’s uniform, but they simply didn’t know their facts. Anyway, the point is, it would have been difficult for Edith to find a young man of the right age who came from an appropriate family, who was attractive, who had prospects, and, given the shortage, Strallan isn’t that bad an option. So I think they’re both being sensible in their different ways.
The wound we chose was the disablement of one arm but not the loss of it, as we didn’t want to deal with all the trick photography it would have involved. We did in fact have an explanation of what had happened to him at one stage, but it got cut. I rather regretted this, but it didn’t seem to worry anyone.
13 Molesley is really our downstairs Edith, since the pair of them are permanently at war with what appears to be their destiny. Typically, now that Molesley is Matthew’s valet and butler, and now that Matthew is marrying the heiress and is going to live at the main house, Molesley thinks at last he’s got a lucky break. But no. Matthew tries to be kind to Molesley, ever since he was reprimanded by Robert for not taking Molesley’s ambition seriously – ‘You’ve got to remember this is his job, and you have to respect that,’ or whatever he said – but of course Matthew still doesn’t really want to be bothered with a valet and he doesn’t see why he has to be. Before the war, people like Matthew were obliged to live as everyone of their kind lived. But more and more, after the war, that pressure was gone. And when a woman didn’t want the nuisance of employing a lady’s maid, and couldn’t really afford it, the pressure to keep up appearan
ces was very much less than it had been ten or twenty years before. So that was, like other forces, working against the old system and actually unravelling it.
14 Here, Robert is informed that there’s a new footman immediately after he’s got back, having learnt he’s got no money. So he overreacts, which I think is truthful.
15 People like the Crawleys, or quite a few of them, didn’t understand how to live differently. What were they supposed to do? Remember, if Robert sold, it wasn’t only his own pride that would suffer; it would be a terrible blow for all the people who lived and worked at Downton, on the estate, in the villages. I remember my father telling me about the reaction of his great-aunt when some sort of employment tax was introduced between the wars, and suddenly the cost of keeping servants shot up. ‘Doesn’t the Prime Minister realise I have twelve servants indoors whom I have to support?’ My father said, ‘Yes, Aunt Phyllis, but I think the idea is that you’re not supposed to have twelve servants.’ Her reply to this was quite hard for him to answer: ‘But how will it help anyone for them to lose their jobs?’
16 I remember the read-through in Ealing Town Hall, and Matt Milne, who had been cast as Alfred, was sitting down, and I said, ‘Oh, hello Matt, we haven’t met, I’m Julian,’ and he started to get up and he just seemed to go on and on and on getting up… It was quite extraordinary. Footmen were paid by height, not so much in the 1920s when the wheels were coming off, but in the nineteenth century a footman of six foot would command a higher salary than a footman of five foot six. This was because, while footmen had jobs to do, they were essentially status symbols. So you wanted them good-looking and tall, which was no doubt why so many scandals emerged from the employing of footmen. They were like gorgeous beach boys lined up in livery. That said, what you wanted was six foot, not six foot six, or whatever Matt is, because then they would stand out and dwarf those around them. Hugh Bonneville, who plays Robert, is extremely tall. He doesn’t photograph as tall, particularly on television, because he’s in proportion, but when you’re standing next to him he’s actually very tall. So, for him, it didn’t matter that we had a very tall footman, but if I had a footman of six foot six every time I walked into the dining room I’d feel like a midget.
We make the point of Alfred’s height with a shot of Carson looking up at this immensely tall footman. Carson hasn’t chosen Alfred, so he doesn’t really warm to him at first, but then he finds in Alfred an old-fashioned soul who actually wants to learn how to be a good footman, and eventually how to be a cook, which is his real interest. He’s not casual about his work at all, so everything Carson had feared from a boy who’d been wished on him doesn’t come to pass.
O’Brien champions Alfred. This is not only because he is her nephew, but because I always like to give unsympathetic characters something sympathetic to do every now and then. It means the audience must keep an open mind about them. Remember how in the second series she supported the shell-shocked valet? Here, she puffs up Alfred to give him confidence, particularly as she’s now fallen out with her old pal Thomas, which strand we play through this series.
17 We are starting Daisy’s new story here. She’s been promoted, except that it wasn’t really a promotion because there’s no new kitchen maid. When you are promoted your first human instinct is to give orders to the people who are doing the job you used to do, and that has been denied her. Of course, going on strike was dangerous in an unprotected, un-unionised job. There was absolutely nothing to stop your being sacked on the spot. But nevertheless, the withholding of labour had begun to creep in, and by the end of the 1920s it would be a serious part of the landscape – an equivalent of the rioting in the eighteenth century. In those days, the Government may have been aristocratic and entirely untrammelled, but that wasn’t the whole story. The un-enfranchised working class used the tool of rioting, and they had to be placated. It’s not the same as the ballot box, but rioting is nevertheless an expression of public will that has to be obeyed, or at least dealt with.
18 Matthew is always trying to control his mother’s propensity for deliberately stirring things up.
19 Nobody comes to stay before the night of the wedding. I did that because I knew we were finishing the episode with the wedding, so we would never have to explain who was staying and who wasn’t. Otherwise, we would have found ourselves with a whole other chunk of story.
It was a big thing for us to get Shirley MacLaine as Martha Levinson. A lot of people wanted to come into the series and they made approaches, but we were very clear we wanted someone who was of an equal weight with Maggie, but at the same time her opposite, loving the future, loving change, wishing to move forward. Martha has no nostalgia in her. She wants to climb into fast cars and get moving. And there was something about Shirley’s persona that made this believable. She and Maggie are almost exactly the same age, actually, and she’s always been marching to the rhythm of her own drum in the public eye. Whether it was China, or the aliens, Shirley’s always been on her own track. She seemed to bring that quality to the part in such a good way. Anyway, we asked her to do it and very obligingly she accepted.
20 My little joke about the Boy Scouts’ motto: ‘Be prepared.’ In fact, his great-granddaughter is a friend of ours, so it was also a fun reference.
21 Here, Matthew’s desire for a simpler life resurfaces, whereas Violet takes the other moral position: ‘An aristocrat with no servants is as much use to the county as a glass hammer.’ For her, and women like her, their job was to create employment, to be a social centre, to entertain, and to be the hub of the whole thing. And once they’re not prepared to do that, then what’s the point of them? Obviously many people now would say there is no point to them, and maybe there isn’t, once they’re not doing all that stuff. But I think you can understand Violet’s argument when they were content to take the weight and be the hub of the county.
22 One of my mother-in-law’s phrases. It’s true, the more you own the more you have to worry about. One of my great-aunts, Ierne – a rather odd name (I think it’s medieval; we always thought they’d misspelt Irene, but they hadn’t) – once said, ‘There is a time in life when you wish to acquire and there is a time to give away,’ and I think that is fairly true for most people. I remember we went for lunch with her and she gave some things to me, including a portrait of herself as a girl. And I knew she was giving it to me because I would then take it on and the painting would become part of the family stuff, long after her death, and so it proved. We have the picture still. She had ensured its passage. Quite moving, really.
23 I had to watch myself and always say ‘sacked’ and never ‘fired’, because these Americanisms creep in on us and you find yourself using them. ‘Fired’ was never used in this country until thirty years ago, or even less time than that. You never heard it.
24 Hugo Swire, who’s an MP, is a friend of ours and he contributed his name. The big question about this storyline is: why, if Matthew has been left something, has there been such a long time lag? Is it likely? When you are left anything you do hear pretty quickly. But of course all will be explained.
25 Matthew is quite snobbish about Branson, even though he’d never admit it. He would say he was the intellectual, sensible one and his wife was brought up in Never Never Land. Even so, Mary, who is more like Violet, is inclined to just get over it now. It’s happened. She didn’t think it was a good idea – she thought it was mad, in fact – but now it’s in the past, and so once he shows up she’s quite prepared to be friendly and just get on with it. Whereas you still have Matthew referring to ‘the chauffeur’. Of course, they all know there’s going to be trouble.
26 We have this little, slightly vulgar joke, which is about as vulgar as we get.
27 Mrs Hughes was in this difficult position because she was forced to testify against Bates and always felt terrible about it. She didn’t lie; she just wished she hadn’t had to tell the truth.
28 Branson (Allen Leech) is a very useful character to me really from
this scene onwards, because for the first time we are allowed to have a working-class character in the family scenes. Until this point, all the working-class characters were in service, but now we’ve got one simply conversing and having different points of view, with completely logical reasons. And although by this time we knew that Jessica Brown Findlay wanted to leave the series at the end of the third year (which we’ll talk about when we get to episode five), from now on I had no desire for Allen to leave because he can always come up with a different argument for all of the various issues. We also have the awkwardness of his being served by the people with whom he was formerly working – a useful awkwardness that we mine in several stories. Naturally, Carson sees him as a traitor to his own kind, and an interloper, and everything bad.
29 The name Pulbrook came from the florist Pulbrook and Gould. As I was writing this sentence the doorbell went. I opened it and took delivery of a flower arrangement from Pulbrook and Gould, and so I called him Mr Pulbrook.
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