5 Robert is defending his position, which consists of getting what he believes to be the best man for the job, but Cora’s view, which might have saved Sybil’s life (except that Jessica Brown Findlay was leaving the series), is that we know Tapsell has delivered lots of lords and royal highnesses, but he doesn’t know Sybil. He doesn’t know the family. So they come to this compromise of including Clarkson, which is, in a way, a recipe for trouble.
6 I like to remind the audience of these endless rules of the game.
7 We lost this section, but I was trying to show how Mary sees, in the end, that it is not in anyone’s interest for the estate to be badly run. That said, she has to take a little time to get there.
8 This scene went, but its motivation did not. We decided we should have an episode without an Anna/Bates scene in prison on opposite sides of a table, because by then we had played that formula so much.
9 This is a theme of the series. Matthew is not exactly impatient for Mary to get pregnant, but is certainly looking forward to it, an inference which she quite deliberately does not wish to pick up.
10 Thomas is behind Jimmy, guiding his hands over the hands of the clock, so we get the message. There’s something about the detail of clocks that I find very interesting. I originally made Michael Gambon’s character in Gosford Park a clock expert, but Michael’s speciality is guns and he said, ‘Could I possibly change it from clocks to guns, because if I’m dismantling and tending guns, then I know what I’m doing.’ This seemed to me a sensible and logical comment and so I did it.
11 Vera’s manner of committing suicide is very malicious. Her poisoning had to be by a prepared substance, as opposed to something natural, because if she just took poison then it would seem like suicide. She had to take poison in a way that would make it seem most unlikely that she would do it to herself. Therefore, to poison a cake or a pie was an obvious solution, because nobody would think that would be the way to finish yourself off.
12 Isobel hasn’t faced the disturbance that she will bring to her own household, because she doesn’t like to think that anyone disagrees with her – anyone who’s decent, that is. She pretends she needs another kitchen maid, which of course she doesn’t really, and in all of this Ethel is much more realistic. She’s grateful, but she understands the complications inherent in this much more clearly than Isobel does, so really we’re on her side.
13 Mary is coming to see that Matthew is not advocating heartlessness. He thinks caring is compatible with efficiency, but he does not believe that anyone benefits from a failing estate. He feels they should have realistic rents and generally exist in the modern world. Whereas Robert would still take the sentimental view that they can’t turn out a bad tenant, no matter what they’ve done. Then again, that is why we like him.
14 Sir Philip Tapsell, played very well by Tim Pigott-Smith, is a snob doctor, a type that we’ve all come across. His manner is emollient. He’s puffing them all up and of course he doesn’t want the local doctor pushing in. This is because (a) he’ll just complicate things, and (b) if it all goes well he has to share the glory and what’s the point? How can this ridiculous local sawbones know anything that he, the great Sir Philip Tapsell, doesn’t know?
15 ‘Very severely bruised’ was a truthful saying at the time and there were cases of some bruising being misdiagnosed as a full spinal break. The Daily Mail decided to invent the story that Matthew’s spine had been broken and then miraculously came together. This, of course, is not what we said or did.
16 From Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love.
17 When Daisy comes in as the spoilsport we immediately see that she has miscalculated, because by making a ‘them and us’ situation, with Jimmy and Alfred both on Ivy’s side, Daisy is immediately wrong-footed. She should never have let that happen.
18 The phrase ‘all Sir Garnet’, meaning ‘all is in order’, came from the super-efficient Sir Garnet Wolseley, who served in the British Army across the globe, becoming commander-in-chief at the end of the nineteenth century.
19 I was rather sad at the cuts here, because I felt Ethel’s defence of Mrs Bird was quite important for the understanding of the whole business of reputation: ‘She did what she had to do. Good luck to her.’ So the only realistic thing, if Ethel wants to keep her job, is to be a cook-housekeeper and, of course, she can’t cook, but she thinks she can fake it.
20 The beginning of the alliance between Mary and Branson.
21 Saving a curdled hollandaise came to me from Mrs Field, who used to work for a great friend of mine, and she taught me two things: one was how to make those very light biscuits – almost wafers – you have with ice cream, and the other was how to save curdled hollandaise, which was to trickle in a yolk, and it does work actually, or it should. This scene tells us various things: 1) Ivy’s going to be very grateful to Alfred and he will mistake that for something more; 2) Daisy has played it wrongly and has forced them into each other’s arms; 3) Alfred’s real interest is food. All three of those storylines are pushed forward here and now Jimmy and Alfred are fighting out the position.
22 This is a phrase of my mother-in-law’s. It’s rather like that moment when you’re waiting for people to come for dinner and there’s a sort of dead moment when nobody’s arrived. In our family it was particularly sharp because my mother, during the Second World War, had been in South America with my eldest brother, who was little (four or thereabouts), and my father was somewhere at the front. She was staying with her sister in Argentina and an English ship had come into harbour. They knew a couple of the officers on board and they’d gone down and invited all the officers to come for supper. Unbeknownst to them, after they left, an Admiral had come on board and they’d all been put on duty and couldn’t get a message off the ship. So my mother and her sister and her sister’s husband just sat there for the whole evening with this dinner for 20, and so, for the rest of her life, she always had this slight thing, ‘Suppose nobody comes.’ But anyway, that was what reminded me.
23 A reminder that the cook of a great household had to be something of a campaign manager as well.
24 This is the first time Jimmy starts to suspect that Thomas’s interest in him is not quite pukka. Up till then they’ve just been joshing along and, suddenly, a man is stroking his cheek. We’re about to begin that story.
25 Just my inbuilt resistance to experts. I can’t bear them because they never are experts.
26 Now we have Ethel’s first failure. I wanted something quite difficult and I felt a kidney soufflé was sufficiently arcane to be a challenge, but my feeling was, with a cook, a real cook like Mrs Patmore, they have certain things they can do very, very easily – they’re just part of their repertoire – and other things that they have to concentrate on. A kidney soufflé would be the sort of thing that a cook would perfect so that it would always seem exotic and interesting, no doubt with an anchovy sauce or something, and obviously Ethel’s seen it made hundreds of times and has not in any way understood how difficult it is. Isobel is beginning to understand that she’s employed a cook who can’t cook, but she’s determined to make her point.
27 I think Sybil’s ambition for Branson is right. One of the things she feels is that they couldn’t see who he really was because he was a chauffeur, and she doesn’t want him to go on being a chauffeur. It’s nothing to do with snobbery. It’s to do with his potential.
28 The modern philosophy is that we can leave our past behind us. Victorians believed that we carried our past with us and we were never essentially free of whatever we had done. I think that the extreme of both is unrealistic. Our belief today that some public figure can expect high respect, say, four years after being involved in some sordid scandal, is nonsense. And we see people living this nonsense. So my own feeling is probably not as the Victorians felt – that we have to be blamed for our sins all our life – nor the idea that we are washed entirely clean. We are all the product of our choices and that’s what, in a way, Isobel
is working against – although we like her for it.
29 I had a lot of responses from people involved in the care and study of eclampsia. They were glad that the condition was being brought back into the public consciousness, because it does need more money for research. It’s the usual thing: the creaking gate gets the oil in medicine as much as in anything else. It’s the same with the unfashionable cancers. Pancreatic cancer gets almost nothing.
30 Ethel can’t even make a hot drink that Isobel likes. I hate honey. I’ve hated honey all my life and it’s always the sort of ultimate health thing that you stir honey into this, that and the other. I can’t stand it. I don’t know why, but it’s just a taste I can’t bear. So I’ve given Isobel the same resistance.
31 Mrs Patmore has understood that Ivy’s interested in Jimmy, not Alfred. So they’re all in love with the wrong person, really. It’s a little play out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the kitchen.
32 I think it’s always good to make these points for the younger generation – they assume that the place for a husband is sitting by the bed, holding his wife’s hand, and they don’t realise that for several hundred years he was nowhere near. Certainly, for my own father, whose children were born from the late Thirties through the Forties, to have been present would’ve been an abomination. My mother always said, ‘You don’t want anyone in the room you know socially when you’re having a baby.’ She was one of those who then made sure she was made up and had her hair done, with a nice little bed-jacket and some gladioli, and then he was allowed in. There was no coming in until she’d been put back into shape.
33 A picture was released of Sybil and Branson together. All the papers took it up and they made a false newspaper, showing the happy couple, which was handed out. They didn’t realise what lay in the last few pages.
34 Thomas, who is not usually generous, is generous about Sybil, because they had that time in the hospital working alongside each other. I think that’s reasonably truthful, because those situations stay with you.
35 O’Brien hasn’t quite brought the situation to the boil yet, so she doesn’t want Jimmy saying lay off. She wants nothing said until it gets out of hand.
36 We have this very atmospheric moment – there had been an advertisement break here – of looking up through the hall in the dark with one light and Mary’s shadow running as the first harbinger of doom as she races in to her parents’ room to wake them.
37 There was sometimes an interval before the fitting that killed the mother. So you had this awful kind of false dawn of thinking you’re through it and then we have this scene.
38 Talking to Allen Leech afterwards about when he says, ‘Please wake up, love,’ I asked, ‘Where did that come from?’ It was, he recalled, some deathbed he was at and he sort of reverted… I suddenly had an image of this little Dublin boy, in the grip of helpless grief, and that was all him. Not me. Which I thought was really very, very good.
39 In fact, they all played this scene terribly well. I think it is one of our best episodes ever.
40 This moment between Thomas and Anna – it’s always important to find these different conjunctions of different characters, and a moment like that gives you the opportunity to bring together people who are not necessarily linked in the scenes.
41 I think it’s truthful that Mary doesn’t believe they will remain reconciled, but they will just be reconciled for this moment.
42 Again, we try not to tell the audience what they know. What we tell them here is that there’s no reason why Mrs Bartlett should tell the truth, which may not have occurred to the audience. We don’t tell them the facts again, because they’ve had those, so we tell them the only element of it they may not have thought of.
43 It’s a lapse of taste for Matthew and Murray at this moment to be discussing the estate, which Matthew at once sees. It’s really not right. They shouldn’t have brought it up at that point. I’m on Mary’s side there. Matthew wasn’t thinking. It was just that Murray was in the house.
44 I felt we needed to indicate how they were going to manage with the baby, because otherwise it leaves too many unanswered questions. Although this scene didn’t stay in, we made it fairly clear later, I think.
45 It is a marvellous moment when Violet pats Carson’s arm. Previously, in the three years of the series, we’ve never seen any physical contact between Violet and Carson. They’re perfectly friendly and they’ve backed each other up on various things, but they’d never touched each other and, in a sense, her patting him is a kind of equalising gesture – that in the face of grief these social distinctions don’t matter. Maggie Smith did this very, very well. She stops and sighs and her whole shoulder shakes, then she straightens up and goes in because, for someone like her, she would think it the height of ill-breeding to make things worse by visiting her grief on them.
One of the things that always irritates me – you know they say of people, ‘He was the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral’ – is the way, particularly nowadays, that we’re all much more sobby than we used to be. People sort of arrogate the grief to themselves as if they’re the one really suffering. Sometimes you have to say, ‘Look, this isn’t about you,’ as they’re sobbing and sobbing away. There’s that wonderful moment at the funeral of the Duke of Kent, who had been killed in an air crash in the Second World War, when the impresario Binkie Beaumont said to Noël Coward, who was showering tears, ‘Cheer up, Noël, you’re not the widow.’
46 The difficulty here is that Cora realises, if they had done what Doctor Clarkson suggested right at the beginning, not that Sybil would have lived but that she might have lived, and that’s just a fact, and Violet is trying to give some comfort. She doesn’t usually talk about feelings, so I always think it’s quite effective when she does.
47 The shot of Branson and the child was filmed in what’s called the Portico Bedroom behind the portico, like a sort of fortress that he’s locked into, this alien boy with his tiny child.
ACT ONE1
1 EXT. DOWNTON. DAY.
Mourners are leaving, some in chauffeured cars, some workers and villagers on foot, farmers in horse-drawn traps. The male gentry are in black morning coats and top hats, but some of the others wear suits with black arm bands. Robert is there, thanking the guests.2
2 INT. DRAWING ROOM. DOWNTON. DAY.
Matthew is with Branson.
MATTHEW: I know we all sound like parrots, Tom, but I really would like to help if I can. So would Mary.
BRANSON: I’ve a baby I can’t look after, no job, no money. I’m exiled from my country, and my wife is dead. I’m past help, but thank you.
The rest of the family are assembled. Robert enters.
ROBERT: The Southesks looked for you to say goodbye…*
CORA: I was here.
But her voice is heavy with sorrow. Isobel stands.
ISOBEL: I hope you’ll tell me if there’s anything I can do. Anything at all.
MARY: Thank you.
VIOLET: I’ll come with you. Save him getting the car out twice.
ROBERT: You’re both very welcome to stay for some dinner.
VIOLET: I don’t think so. Grief makes one so terribly tired.3
She squeezes Robert’s hand and pats Cora’s shoulder.
VIOLET (CONT’D): Goodbye, my dear. Now that it’s over, try to get some rest.
Violet kisses Mary and Edith, and then she and Isobel leave. Cora looks up.
CORA: Is it over? When one loses a child, is it ever really over?4
3 INT. SERVANTS’ HALL/PASSAGE. DOWNTON. DAY.
The servants are having tea. Carson looks in.
CARSON: Is the dining room clear?
ALFRED: It is, Mr Carson. I must say, the funeral gave them a good appetite.
Two of the maids giggle.
CARSON: And what, may I ask, is so funny?
ANNA: It’s all right, Mr Carson. They didn’t mean any harm.
She turns to the young newcomers.
> ANNA (CONT’D): We were all very fond of Lady Sybil, you see. We got to know her so much better during the war, and now we’re very sad at the loss.
CARSON: If you want to do well at Downton, you should know these things without being told.
He turns away. Mrs Hughes is in the passage. He goes to her.
CARSON (CONT’D): I ask you. In the old days, their mothers used to train them, at least in the basics. Now they arrive knowing nothing.
MRS HUGHES: Perhaps their mothers don’t want them in service any more.
CARSON: And what are they supposed to do? Become bankers and lawyers?
MRS HUGHES: And why not, Mr Carson? Why not?5
Back in the Servants’ Hall, Jimmy is sitting by Thomas.
ALFRED: Cheer up, Mr Barrow. A long face won’t solve anything.
ANNA: Leave him alone. He knew Lady Sybil better than any of us.
THOMAS: Except you. We were the two who really knew her.
JIMMY: I’d say your grief speaks well for her.
THOMAS: Thank you for that.
He puts his hand over Jimmy’s and squeezes it.
THOMAS (CONT’D): Thank you for saying that.
Jimmy allows himself a slight grimace to Anna.6
4 INT. DRAWING ROOM. CRAWLEY HOUSE. NIGHT.
Isobel has removed her hat but has not changed. The door opens and Ethel comes in with a tray.
ETHEL: Are you sure you wouldn’t like this laid in the dining room, ma’am?
ISOBEL: No, thank you. I’d like to eat quickly and have an early night.
ETHEL: How was the service?
Downton Abbey, Series 3 Scripts (Official) Page 31