28 Up to this point, Robert has been trying to get used to the idea that his chauffeur is his son-in-law. He’s not keen, which I think is fair enough. I did have some letters from America asking why he would mind, but come on! And he is trying to be just. The problem is when you subconsciously resent someone, and when they then give you a legitimate excuse to resent them they release all your frustrations and irritations. For Branson to abandon his pregnant wife in Dublin while he escapes is, for Robert, to break a basic moral law, which allows him to vent his fury.
Mary’s position is different. She thought Sybil was mad to marry the chauffeur, but it’s happened, there’s no point in going over old ground. Now Branson is her brother-in-law and he’s soaking wet, so the first thing to do is to get him into dry clothes and give him some food. She goes in and lies quite easily. As she says in a later episode, ‘I don’t mind lying.’
I think one of the great reveals of marriage is that until you marry you think you come from one of the most dysfunctional families in the land, but when you marry you see that your wife’s family is just as dysfunctional as your own. And as you get older you realise that pretty well all families have dysfunctional elements – grandchildren who have gone off the rails, hippies and drunks and God knows what tucked in the shadows. We’ve got a sign at home that someone gave us: ‘Remember, as far as anyone knows, we are a normal family.’
29 Edward Shortt was Home Secretary in Lloyd George’s Cabinet. We now get into one of the basic elements of this world, which, in a junior way, I have lived by all my life – string pulling. It started early. My father failed to register my birth when I was born in Cairo and this meant I was an Egyptian national. I was eleven when my father was posted to Nigeria and they tried to get me a British passport so I could join them out there for the school holidays. It was blocked. I remember being with my mother when he returned. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you what I have done,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve bought the boy a fez.’ And he took one out from behind his back and put it on his head. I’ve still got it. Of course, she was furious. In the end they could only solve it by pulling a string; they rang some friend, some cousin, some nephew in the Home Office, and suddenly I had a British passport.
The trouble is that it’s easy to lose touch with the frustration of having no strings to pull. Cora knows that when the Home Secretary hears that the Earl of Grantham has asked for an appointment, he will get one. Whether he would now is another thing, but in 1920 he certainly would get one.
30 The toaster was to remind people that the Departure of the Servant was paralleled inevitably and logically with the Arrival of the Gadget. The more there weren’t other people to undertake these tasks, the more electrical irons and Hoovers and toasters and the like took over. Sometimes it went too far. There was a great attempt in the 1960s to have drip-dry shirts that did not need ironing, but they were frightful, which the manufacturers soon realised. ‘The shirt you don’t iron’ had to be abandoned and we returned to labour-intensive cotton, because they could not get a drip-dry shirt to feel anything but horrible.
31 And now we have the very handsome Jimmy, played by Ed Speleers. When I was acting I played a part in a television series about two sisters. One had nothing unusual about her, and the other was a raving beauty. Essentially the story was about how the raving beauty was destroyed by her looks because she was taken by them into all sorts of areas and relationships that didn’t work for her, whereas the dull one didn’t have a fabulous life, but she had a perfectly livable, satisfactory one. When we got to the read-through, the raving beauty turned out to be played by a completely ordinary-looking woman – quite a good actress, but ordinary. I said to the director that I didn’t understand his choice. ‘Isn’t she meant to be a raving beauty?’ He said, ‘Oh, I see. You mean we should have gone for outer beauty?’ To which I replied that this was the whole point of the story – the destructiveness of outer beauty. But he couldn’t see it, so of course it didn’t work.
There was a real prejudice then against good-looking actors – not in America, but in England. Even in this case, with Jimmy, I remember some slight resistance when I said that his being good-looking was key. But I thought, no, the whole point of this character is that he is really handsome, and that is what is going to make the trouble with Thomas. Eventually, Jill Trevellick, our wonderful casting director, came up with Ed Speleers, who was clearly gorgeous and exactly what I was hoping for. And he was very good. Anyway, he’s here as a heartbreaker.
I think we sometimes forget that, these days, the camera constantly exposes the national audience to immensely good-looking people. Before television and films, you didn’t see raving beauties very often, and when you did it was incredible. You have stories of people standing on chairs to watch people like the Countess of Dudley or Lillie Langtry, who had acquired their fame through their beauty, which to us seems strange, but when you remember this was the world before the silver screen it becomes more understandable.
32 Mary understands her father and here we go on with the business of Matthew’s investigating Downton’s management. You keep these story lines alive with the odd reference all the way through, because really what you are saying to the public is: I am not dealing with this storyline here, you will get it shortly, but I am just reminding you about it so that when you do get a scene that takes the narrative further you haven’t forgotten what’s going on.
33 When Branson says, ‘We all live in a harsh world, but at least I know I do,’ it seems to me a truthful observation. I am reminded of a story told to me by a friend, an actress, very glamorous, and also very rich because her father was very rich. She was driving home around Trafalgar Square after a show and went through a red light. The police stopped her and pulled her over, and they were perfectly justified, but because she hadn’t taken off her stage make-up, and was driving a white Lamborghini, and because she was young and blonde, they decided she was a tart. And she said she suddenly saw the treatment you get when the police think you’re nothing. She had always been treated as the daughter of a multi-millionaire and everyone was always very charming. But on this particular evening they emptied her handbag onto the road – just tipped it out onto the tarmac – and pushed her back against the vehicle. She said how, in those moments, you suddenly realise we are all living on a sort of pie crust, and underneath it is volcanic lava. I have never forgotten the image, and how every now and then you glimpse what life could be like if you weren’t permanently wrapped in cotton wool. I hope never to lose that awareness, but never to lose the cotton-wool wrapping either, if possible.
34 When Jimmy tells how Lady Anstruther begged him to go with her to France, we now lay a plot that we don’t reap until the fifth series. Carson is interested. ‘She “begged” you, did she?’ Even he, loyal as he is to the upper echelons, picks up the hint of an inappropriate interest in Jimmy by Lady Anstruther, which we don’t develop here, but we do eventually.
35 I was sorry to lose this. Mason is used as Daisy’s deus ex machina while we wait for her to turn into the kind of person who can benefit from what Mason intends to give her. That is her character arc. This theme is taken up very strongly in Season Five, where she starts to educate herself. It is also useful for her to have someone else she can be honest with, so she isn’t only confiding in Mrs Patmore. Here, Mason gives her permission to have a life beyond William, which, in real life, is always an important development when you are friendly with your in-laws and your spouse is dead.
36 I was rather sad here, because Penelope Wilton objected to this dialogue and didn’t quite say it as it’s written. Isobel was supposed to remark that Matthew was destined for a different kind of life, by which I wanted to make it clear that even liberal, forgiving, understanding people can at times accept the status quo unconsciously, in a way that is not cruel exactly but unthinking. Ethel wants to say that if she gives Charlie to the Bryants then he’ll be destined for a different kind of life as well. We ended up with a slightly sentime
ntal version of the moment, because we don’t challenge the fact that even Isobel assumes that Matthew will have a better life than Charlie, because that’s what is ordained. It is the moment when Ethel finally makes up her mind that this time she is going to go through with it, and it sort of works but, for me, not quite as well as it could have.
37 Kevin R. McNally, who plays Mr Bryant, is married to Phyllis Logan, who plays Mrs Hughes, so there was a certain hilarity off camera when we were filming these scenes. It was fun for them to be back together. He’s in all the Pirates of the Caribbean films, so they have had to put up with long stretches when he has to go off and do them.
38 This is a typical Downton moment, in that I don’t go on with the scene to the point where Ethel tells them she is going to give them the child, because the audience already knows what she intends. We can imagine the dialogue – ‘Oh, are you sure? Oh, that’s wonderful’ – which, for me, risks a kind of inertia, however emotional a scene may be. If you can’t think of a way to repeat the information in an unexpected way, then on the whole it’s better not to repeat it at all. That’s my philosophy.
39 Footmen were status symbols, as we’ve said before, and in the nineteenth century were paid according to their height. Handsome could also command a pretty good salary, but, as characters in a household, they were fraught with dangers. In the royal family of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in Germany, there was a custom that all the princesses were lit to their bedrooms individually by footmen. Quite inevitably, Princes Marie had to announce that she was pregnant by said footman and the only person who took pity on her was Queen Victoria. The Queen denounced the custom as absurd. What did they think was going to happen? And in fact, she arranged a marriage for the girl – not a royal marriage, but a respectable one – so Princess Marie did actually have a perfectly acceptable life. Victoria even invited her to stay at Osborne, so she ‘lent her face’, as they would have said then. I find this an interesting slant on Victoria, who was realistic enough to see it wasn’t only the girl’s fault.
40 We had actually shot an earlier version of this scene in the Christmas Special at the end of Season Two, but we could not do anything with the child, who was having a horrible time, as he made quite clear. This kind of thing is always depressing for actors when they prepare their arc and perform it, only to be rung up by the director who says, ‘I’m afraid we’ve cut the battle. We’ll remount it if we can.’ Inevitably you don’t believe it, but in this instance we did remount it, and Jill Trevellick found a wonderful little boy who was a natural actor, which most children are not. So we were rewarded for giving it a second chance. For Amy Nuttall, Phyllis Logan and Penelope Wilton, it was a really moving moment. And for me.
41 It was important for the character of Bates not for him simply to be a bruiser, but to have some lateral thinking in order for him to retain the sense that he’s tough but he’s also clever.
42 Dunsany is a name from my own youth – a very old friend was the daughter of Lord Dunsany but she had a different surname, so I use the title as a name, without giving the surname away. Incidentally, Sybil may completely believe Tom’s version of events here, but I am not sure I do. I think he did get into it, and went very, very deep in the planning. His regrets did not surface until the event. I am sure there are many burglars who plan to burgle and when they’ve actually broken into someone’s house wonder what the hell they’re doing there. That is what Branson has gone through. Initially, he was a convinced rebel; his change of heart has come out of the horror of witnessing the burning.
43 ‘Nobody benefits when the thing is badly run.’ For me, this is the Socialist/Conservative conflict. The Socialists pride themselves on a greater consideration for human need, but the Conservative argument is that nobody benefits if the economy is not working. Here, Mary’s position is essentially a Socialist one, where she thinks the people’s good must be put ahead of any considerations of efficiency, while Matthew is the Tory, insisting on decent standards. I can see both sides. It is ultimately a fantasy to think that you can do good in a country if you can’t run the economy. But on the other hand, there are certainly many measures the Labour party wants to bring in that I agree with. But in the end, I suppose I find that when a Labour government again and again and again leaves office with the economy in a mess, it becomes harder and harder to understand how people will continue to empower them.
44 We did an unusually audience-directing shot where Thomas walks past just as Jimmy is putting on his shirt. In this way, we have made Jimmy a love object for Thomas from square one, even if he himself is innocent of it. O’Brien is still festering with her desire for revenge on Thomas, and she is a good plotter because, like all good plotters, she has a lot of patience. She now starts to lay a plot that will burn through the rest of the series.
45 For me, it is the romanticising of revolution that is so dangerous. People like Isabella Gregory and Connie Markievicz did not help, because what they did was drape a gauze of romanticism over the whole thing, as opposed to showing houses in flames and young men getting shot and dying fifty years before their time. This was all the worse because there was a real chance of achieving everything that was achieved without any of it. But I am against upper-class rebels, anyway. They always cause more trouble than any working-class fighter. Better to face the street hero than the Duke of Orleans any day of the week. Here, Robert naturally wants to keep Sybil out of it because she would be a story. Sybil thanks him for it, but whether Branson is grateful is another matter. What I think is difficult for Branson from now on is that he owes his survival and freedom to the power of a system that he disapproves of. And it is only because Robert is a product of that system that he has the power to save Branson. Inevitably, this compromises the very nature of his freedom.
46 Lady Sarah Wilson was born a Spencer-Churchill, the youngest of the 7th Duke of Marlborough’s eleven children. Her husband was in the Army and was killed at the very start of the war in 1914. Before this, he had fought in the Boer War, where she accompanied him. This was not too unusual. I had an aunt whose sister-in-law, Mrs Duberly, went with her husband to the Crimea and had an affair with Lord Cardigan (Jill Bennett played her memorably in Tony Richardson’s film Charge of the Light Brigade). What was unusual was that, in South Africa, when one of its correspondents was arrested by the Boers, Lady Sarah was recruited by the Daily Mail and her dispatches during the Siege of Mafeking made her reputation.
When her nephew, the eighth Duke, married Consuelo Vanderbilt and restored the family’s fortunes, she was impossible to the new bride. She had been de facto mistress at Blenheim and there was a famous moment when she tried to lead the ladies out of the dining room. At the prompting of a friend, Consuelo intercepted her at the door. ‘Are you ill?’ she said. Lady Sarah said no, why should she be? And Consuelo replied that she thought Sarah must be ill because she was leaving early. At that moment Sarah Wilson’s hold on Blenheim was broken.
But she was a brave woman, however difficult she may have been. In 1914 she set up a hospital in France within earshot of the guns at the front and was dealing with really terrible cases when they were brought straight from the trenches. After her husband’s death, she went home for his funeral and returned two weeks later. Anyway, I make Edith refer to her because she is a classic case of how the role of women, even upper-class women, was changing.
47 It’s not that Violet and Cora don’t get on, but they are not mad about each other. That seems to me quite true to life. They have an arrangement, but neither is the first person the other would choose for lunch on a birthday.
48 The twentieth century didn’t invent scandal and, as I have said, footmen certainly figured in plenty of them. Famously, one was employed by the Comte de Castellane, who was married to a daughter of the Duchesse de Dino and (probably) Talleyrand. She was called Pauline. The Duchess came to stay with her daughter and found herself dining with a man who on her last visit had been waiting on her at table, although in this instance he was hav
ing an affair with the master of the house, not the mistress. The Duchess rose, saying that in future she would take her meals in her room. We have already hinted that Lady Anstruther reached a level of intimacy with Jimmy the footman that was not quite right, when he was working for her before he came to Downton.
49 I thought the actors playing the two footmen were well contrasted, thanks to Jill Trevellick again. I remember Robert Altman, who directed Gosford Park, once telling me why he always tried to get famous people to play quite small parts in his films. It was because when they were famous the audience could tell the difference between the characters and they never muddled them up. The danger of casting unknowns is that the audience may be confused. We can’t get stars to play every part in Downton, but that’s where Jill’s skill is shown. She finds actors of the right calibre and age, but so different you are not going to muddle them.
50 I felt it was useful to have a situation where Daisy is not very nice. She is so warm and sympathetic as a character, there’s always a danger she’ll become a bit saccharine, but here she’s not very pleasant to this girl who hasn’t done anything wrong. All she’s done, in fact, is to be very pretty and be attractive to Alfred.
51 Matthew’s ambition is to make changes without putting any noses out of joint, even though this is unrealistic, which I think is reasonably true to life. And by doing that we have set up a storyline that we will turn through a few episodes.
ACT ONE
1 EXT. DOWNTON. NIGHT.
A car drives away, its lights illuminating the façade. The door slams, a man hurries inside, carrying a bag.
1A INT. HALL AND STAIRCASE. DOWNTON. NIGHT
Downton Abbey, Series 3 Scripts (Official) Page 26