This business of not wanting to know always interests me. I don’t mean when people fail to have a check-up because everything seems fine. But when they’ve found a lump and they don’t do anything. I always find that very interesting, and it’s much commoner than one suspects. I can’t imagine not wanting to find out if I discovered a lump.
21 Being a housemaid who also did lady’s maiding as part of her duties was completely standard, but normally it would be – as it is here at Downton – for the daughters or for a visiting guest. A junior position, in other words.
22 This anomaly I always rather like. The ladies’ maids, by definition, saw their master in his dressing gown, or even the valets, on rare occasions, might see the mistress in hers. Any lady’s maid to a married woman certainly saw her husband in bed when they brought in the tea or her breakfast in the morning, and I always feel, given their quite draconian morality, that it makes for an odd sort of blip. But it was standard, and it was why – as we saw in Season Two – it was the maid who would be sent in if there was a drama and the couple had to be woken up. The first choice was the maid, because she was quite used to it.
23 Mary is going to put up a struggle to stay in the house. Her point being, reasonably enough, that if the family are going to leave anyway and lose the house, they might as well live there for the last bit. At least, it would be reasonable, if that were truly her point of view. But her real plan, concealed here, is that she doesn’t want to move out and, in this, I’m on Matthew’s side. He wants them to have their own place at the beginning, that’s all. He doesn’t want anything to be sold or ruined, but he wants to start his marriage alone with his wife, in their own house, and I believe most of the audience is on his side rather than hers.
24 Scarlett Strallen gave me the idea for the name, although I have spelled it differently. She played Mary Poppins on stage in London, and I had written the ‘book’ of the show for Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Coincidentally, her family was known to my mother-in-law, so we’d been involved with the Vaigncourt-Strallens before this. But the actress daughters dropped the Vaigncourt, and I suppose one can understand why.
25 I feel very sympathetic to Strallan all the way through, because he’s trying to be decent and to behave honourably. He feels he’s an old man with an arm that doesn’t work and she’s a young girl and she could do much better. But of course Edith is tougher than that, and if a young and pretty girl is going to push and push and you’re lonely and you’re living all alone in your house…
26 A doctor wouldn’t have wanted to be alone with a woman in a room in case later some sort of accusation was made, not that Doctor Clarkson would say that of Mrs Hughes, but I felt it would have been standard practice for him. It strikes me now how sad it is that we’ve got into this awful fix as a society. I remember being absolutely terrified when I was left in charge of some children of a friend when she had to go and answer the telephone. I just thought, ‘Come back, come back, come back.’ It was me being hysterical, not the kids, who were fine. I think it is a very unhealthy atmosphere that has been created by the zealots.
27 We’ve lost the whole business of lifting stains now. We went through a brief period of artificial dry cleaning when I was younger, with a substance called Dabitoff, which everyone used, but even that’s gone now. We don’t try to get any marks out at all. We don’t iron out wax or iron out butter or do all of that stuff they used to try. Now you just send it to the cleaners and that’s it. It’s rather pathetic, isn’t it?
28 Mary’s plotting with Violet to get the money out of Martha seems to me emotionally valid, because the only reason that Violet tolerated Martha in the first place was because of the money that was coming into the family. And now that the money’s been lost it is only reasonable to expect her to contribute some more. I’ve always made the relationship between Violet and Cora one of respect rather than adoration. Violet would rather Robert had married the niece of one of her friends, but she has accepted that the money meant that the union was important and necessary. But it is still not the way she’d have liked things, and the fact that her son is happy with Cora doesn’t really weigh as heavily as you would think it might. This is entirely drawn from experience.
29 I asked a specialist to tell me what would have happened in the Twenties and how they analysed whether a lump was cancerous. It would have been quite a long process, unlike the very quick results we know today. And again we have the use of the word cancer and Mrs Hughes forcing herself to say the word, which has been the elephant in the room up to that point. The business with the injection and the fact that the doctor has to do it whether or not it hurts comes from my mother. She was with the daughter of a friend who was having a baby and another woman kept insisting how much it was going to hurt. Finally, Mummy took her aside and said, ‘Since she’s got to have it, what is the point of going on about how much it hurts?’ I thought of that and used it here.
30 Just a note to show the freer customs of the Americans, which was why they were enjoyed at every level of society. They had a more relaxed way of behaving. This was not immoral, I hasten to add; just that they were more easy and unconstrained.
31 We had to make the line of inheritance complicated so that we could all enjoy this middle ground when Matthew is, first of all, possibly going to get something, then probably going to get something, but it doesn’t become certain until we’ve had the best part of two episodes. For a start, trying to get a death certificate out of India, how long would that take? Years ago my father asked me to bring the family tree up-to-date at the College of Arms. I thought all you did was photograph a page from Burke’s Landed Gentry and send it in. Absolutely no chance. They regard this venerable publication as a work of fiction, and everything has to be proved. Everything. Not just birth, marriage and death, but every army rank, every navy rank, every house ownership, every honour, every medal – everything. In the end, it took four years. A lot of the stuff was affected by the history of the time. In the second half of the seventeenth century several of the Felloweses were in Jamaica, and then elsewhere in the West Indies. By the eighteenth century a lot of them were in India and then by the early twentieth they’re in Africa. The whole thing took forever, but I’m rather proud of myself. For each generation I proved every sibling, so that any descendants only had to prove themselves up to that sibling.
We’ve created a real point of difference between Matthew and Mary by this stage, and if I were in her shoes I wouldn’t understand it either. I’m very sympathetic to Mary really. Like her, I don’t find that his protestations of love ring very loudly.
32 We don’t meet Harold until the Christmas Special at the end of the fourth year. But I wanted to set him up because I felt, if we ever were to meet, then if no earlier reference had been made to him it wouldn’t be very believable. One of the problems for me with some of those American soaps was that they were always turning out to have had children they’d never mentioned or had entirely forgotten about, which I didn’t find terrifically believable. But I think the fact that Harold hates to leave America got me out of trouble. And now Violet and Cora are both still trying to get Martha’s money.
Of course Martha, in a sense, is playing with them here, because she knows perfectly well, as we will discover later, that she only has a life income, but she’s allowing them to think she is worth stalking because, I suspect, she enjoys it.
33 Alfred has been set up, but he does not betray Thomas.
34 Carson here is very short with Mrs Hughes. He feels she’s not pulling her weight. This is all designed to get the audience’s sympathy.
35 Violet’s resistance to dinner jackets continues for quite a few episodes to come. Inevitably, as the series rolls forward, dinner jackets start to be imposed on her, but at this point a dinner jacket was really quite informal and you would not often wear it. In fact, a dinner jacket would have been the same as a smoking jacket in my youth. When I was young, men like my father would often come home and put on their smoking j
acket over their perfectly ordinary trousers, as a way of relaxing in the evening.
Funnily enough, what is happening now to the smoking jacket is what happened to the dinner jacket – it is becoming formal evening wear. In those days, you could wear it in the evening with a black tie, but only in your own house or, a little bit later, if you were staying in that house. But now that’s gone and people drive across the county in a smoking jacket. In fact, in Dorset, a smoking jacket with no tie has become an acceptable evening costume, so we are now moving onto the next generation of that. I’ve been in white tie a few times recently, which is quite unusual and I like the look of it. I think it looks handsome, but you need a valet. It’s not a costume to put on with no help, and I think that, as much as anything else, was why it died – putting it on is just a hell of a palaver.
36 Robert does not want Strallan as a son-in-law, although he’s trying to be nice. I don’t blame Robert in this, actually. You wouldn’t want him for your young daughter, so again it is quite a nice Downton situation where essentially you’re on both sides. Both men are perfectly pleasant and are only trying to do their best as they see it.
37 The dinner has to be an incredible display of aristocratic seigneurial right so that Martha is blazed into submission by seeing the majesty of the whole thing. That’s the idea, anyway.
38 One of the reasons why all these American heiresses were so numerous during this period was that a rich man in America would make all his children rich. That was not the case in England, where the eldest son got the lot. The others might be given a nice rectory in Wiltshire, but even that was rare. Consuelo Vanderbilt brought $9 million when she married the Duke of Marlborough, and she had two brothers. That would never have happened in England. An heiress meant literally the sole survivor, the irony being that, inevitably, so many of the English heiresses were bad breeders, because they came from families that had literally died out, whereas in America that wasn’t the case at all. An heiress could have plenty of brothers or sisters.
However, this custom (of treating all your children democratically) is one of the reasons why it’s very hard for American fortunes to last more than two or three generations, because they keep being subdivided, and one of the ironies now is that this is happening in more and more European families. They don’t understand why their importance is fading away, but they will leave a house that has been in the family for 300 years between their children. And the sad fact is, once the ownership is shared, that house will have to be sold.
39 Mrs Hughes is not a believer in the aristocratic principle in the same way as Carson. I’m sure that plenty of servants weren’t, and she represents them in the series. For them, it was a job. If they had a good employer then that was great, if their employer was less good it was less great, but they didn’t have to be paid-up believers, either way. When the end of this way of life comes for Mrs Hughes (and there were many of her kind) and she has to find something else to do, it may be worrying but it won’t be a cause for a fit of weeping. She won’t regard it as a terrible injustice in the eyes of God that the system has come to an end, and if she can get a job running a small hotel, which she would do well, then that would be absolutely fine. Whereas for Carson the aristocratic principle is woven into his very woof, so we are dealing with sharply contrasting emotions. Here she vents her feelings unusually severely because she’s upset. ‘I can only suppose that you are overtired,’ says Carson.
40 We’ve always stuck to the distinction of married women having their breakfast in bed and unmarried women not. Occasionally, which I think is true to life, if they have an early start or they’re catching a train, they’ll all come down and have breakfast in the dining room, but as a rule married women had it on a tray in their beds in these houses.
41 Cora’s very sorry that Downton is probably going to have to go, but she’s most sorry for Robert. It is not her own happiness that’s tied up in it, whereas her daughter Mary is completely on the other side. Anything must be sacrificed rather than let this terrible disaster happen. So here we separate their positions to make it clear that they have different feelings – another example of the Downton house style that with every issue we have many different points of view being taken by them all. Nor is Cora above poking some fun at Mary.
I’m always interested that Americans as a rule – and this is a generalisation – don’t feel obliged to go on with a family house, even when they’ve got more than enough money to do so. You do get the odd Biltmore or Groton which has gone on down the line of descent but, as a rule, they take the position that this was their grandmother’s house in Newport and it’s too big for them now. As I say, it isn’t much to do with money. They can be rich, with no reason to sell, but they’ll sell it anyway. So Mary is trying to evoke in Martha an emotion that the older woman doesn’t share. But Mary, of course, is prepared to take her on.
42 Rightly or wrongly, I felt we should make this point quickly, even though sharp-eyed viewers will have recognised her and there’s no attempt to pretend she isn’t Ethel Parks. It is always a challenge in writing this kind of drama that you want the audience to have the information they require in order to follow the story, but you don’t want to be too obviously telling them something they already know. We often have arguments with TV executives – though not with my co-producer Gareth Neame, because he feels exactly the same as I do on this topic – who fail to understand why we don’t have the scene where she learns that he’s dead, or whatever. The answer is because the audience knows it and what they want is the characters’ response to that information, not for the same information to be repeated. If you use up a lot of your screen time on exposition of what the audience already knows, then you pay for it in terms of energy and the show runs out of puff.
43 The test is inconclusive. This is because, throughout my life, I have found that whenever an ‘expert’ says, ‘It should be pretty clear; it’ll either be this or it’ll be that,’ when it comes to it, it never is. Not only in health, but literally in terms of choosing the colours for a room. It’s always inconclusive, so here we employ that principle to stretch it out a bit more.
44 Here we have Martha obviously taking the opposite side to Robert when it comes to Strallan. I am on Robert’s side, because when Martha says, ‘Edith tells me he has a house, he has money, he has a title – everything that you care about,’ she is being unfair. Robert has clearly demonstrated that he doesn’t only care about these things. He wants his daughter to be happy and he doesn’t think a one-armed, middle-aged man who is twenty-five years older is capable of making her happy. So, for me, this is an instance where the audience can get behind Robert. We should not be on Martha’s side. Besides which, she’s really just making trouble for the fun of it. But Robert will be beaten because, as we all know, when every woman in the house is lined up against you, you don’t really have a chance.
45 Bartlett was a surname of my eldest brother’s girlfriend in Nigeria where my father was posted when I was in my early teens. She was called Annabel Bartlett and my parents adored her, which of course is absolutely fatal because it means it will never turn out as they would have it. This example was no exception to that rule.
46 One of the most important rules for a maid or a valet was not repeating what you heard. Inevitably, if you’re in a bedroom with a married couple, you are bound to hear things that are really quite private, and if you gained a reputation for going straight down to the servants’ hall and telling them everything then it would affect your references and, as a consequence, your employability. On the whole, nothing was more prized in a valet or lady’s maid than efficiency and discretion. Ironically, this was the reason why the foreign governments made such a point of enlisting them as spies, because they would hear things the other servants would not, and if they could get into a senior household as spies they were invaluable. If they were maiding the wife of the Lord Chancellor or valet to the Foreign Secretary then they were hearing things that were worth reporting back to th
eir foreign masters. Here, Anna is aware that she is breaking the code but feels that since this is her husband and Bates is bound by the same code there is no disloyalty.
47 I agree with Bates’s comments about Mary’s chances of getting money out of Martha and, in fact, I am always fascinated by hangers-on of the rich. They cling so fervently but I want to say to them, ‘Look, if the food’s great and you’re just enjoying having a good time, then fine, but please don’t think you’re going to end this friendship any richer than you were when it started, because it’s not going to happen.’
48 Of course, Mary is not going to understand at all why Matthew is wrongly dressed, but then Matthew doesn’t realise that this evening is supposed to be a kind of Hollywood version of an aristocratic dinner.
49 I was sad that we lost this scene between Martha Levinson and Reed, because it shows that Martha understands exactly how Mary and Violet are trying to play her. Also, if you have a character who is a body servant to another character, you want to see their working relationship at least once. But anyway, it did go and we are left with Reed coming out of the bedroom and seeing O’Brien.
Also, the irony of the scene, which I like, is that Martha talks about how she and Reed belong to the new world and not the old, whereas in fact the way she treats Reed and issues her with instructions places her quite clearly in the old world. A lot of them, both English and American, thought the new world was going to be a modern version of the old. They didn’t understand it was actually going to be a different place, where they boiled their own eggs and ironed their own shirts – although, to be fair, for that generation it didn’t usually come to that. They may have had a much-reduced staff, but few of them ended up cooking their own supper. Some of them did, one mustn’t forget that, but most limped over the finishing line with their former maid or valet still looking after them. It was their children who had to accept that they were going to live in a completely different way from their parents.
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