ALFRED: Well…
JIMMY: Of course it is, you runner bean. Now step aside, and let me show you how it’s done.
Without waiting for a response, he seizes Daisy’s hand and starts to dance a smooth, accomplished foxtrot, singing to accompany himself as he does so.
CARSON: What is going on here? At a time like this, of sober dignity!
They freeze. Carson is standing in the doorway.
CARSON (CONT’D): Have you lost all sense of shame and propriety, sir? What makes you think you’re the stuff of a first footman? It’s Alfred who looks like a first footman to me. Take a leaf from his book and learn to conduct yourself with discretion!
JIMMY: But, Mr Carson, he was the one —
CARSON: Silence! You’re a disgrace to your livery! And as for you, Daisy, have your years here taught you nothing?
He turns on his heel and goes. Jimmy looks at Alfred.
JIMMY: Thanks for speaking up.
He goes, leaving the others alone.
ALFRED: I don’t suppose you want to practise —
DAISY: I’m very busy. Why don’t you ask Ivy if she’s got any spare time?56
50 INT. DRAWING ROOM. DOWER HOUSE. DAY.
Robert and Cora have come in to find Violet and Clarkson, which is a surprise. Cora is the first to gather her wits.
CORA: Doctor Clarkson.
CLARKSON: Lady Grantham. How are you?
CORA: Much as you’d expect me to be.
VIOLET: Doctor Clarkson has something to tell you, which may alter your view on things a little.
CORA: I don’t mean to be discourteous, but I doubt it.
ROBERT: Since you’re here, I have a few words of my own to say. I feel I owe you an apology —
But Clarkson holds up a hand to cut him off.
CLARKSON: Please, Lord Grantham, if you’ll just allow me…
He hesitates, but he knows he has to say it.
CLARKSON (CONT’D): On that awful night, I’m afraid I may have given you the impression that my recommended course of treatment offered a real chance for Lady Sybil’s survival.
They are all silenced by this.
CLARKSON (CONT’D): The truth, and I’ve done a great deal of research since, as you can imagine, is that the chance was a small one. A tiny one, really. I’d read that early delivery was the only way to avoid the trauma, and it is.
CORA: As you tried so hard to tell us.
CLARKSON: But what I did not quite realise was that eclampsia is almost invariably fatal, with or without a caesarean. Had you agreed, we would have subjected Lady Sybil to the fear and pain of a hurried operation, when in all likelihood she would have died anyway.
CORA: But there was a chance —
Clarkson looks at Violet, nods and then answers.
CLARKSON: An infinitesimal one. The discomfort and the terror would have been all too certain.
ROBERT: So you think Tapsell was right?
CLARKSON: Oh, I cannot go that far. Sir Philip Tapsell ignored all the evidence in a most unhelpful and — I may say — arrogant manner.
ROBERT: But Sybil was going to die.
CLARKSON: When everything is weighed in the balance, I believe that Lady Sybil was going to die.
They are silent as this sinks in.
CLARKSON (CONT’D): And now I’ll take my leave.
He walks out and closes the door. Cora starts to weep and stands there, shaking. Then Robert puts his arms around her and they are motionless, crying together.
Violet has done her work.57
END OF EPISODE SIX
1 When Dan Stevens (Matthew) announced his departure, I had already written Episode Five, in which Sybil was going to die. It had already been cast and set up, and now I suddenly learned that by the end of the series another principal player had to go, too. Well, two actually, as Siobhan Finneran (O’Brien) also decided to leave around this time, but O’Brien’s departure, as a servant moving on to another job, would not be a problem. The point was, I didn’t want to do a second whole episode about someone dying. We’d originally planned to kill Sybil in Five, so we had three episodes for the audience to get over it, but now, suddenly, we had to kill someone else.
I went to Dan and asked if he might be prepared to finish this series and allow us to kill him in the first episode of the following year. That way, we would finish the Special with the baby in the crib and everyone happy. But he couldn’t do that as he’d been offered some films and a play on Broadway, and he didn’t want to cramp his next chapter, which I don’t criticise him for in the least. It was perfectly understandable.
In fact, in the end, his refusal helped me, because if I’d killed him in the first episode of the following season I would have been stuck with funerals and mourning for half the series. But by killing him at the very end of Season Three it allowed me to have a six-month time jump, which we would never do between episodes but we could do between series, and that meant Matthew’s death was in the past and it was time to move on. It gave us the opportunity for the series to be about Mary waking up, as opposed to just being in the pit of despair. But it was a bit of a nightmare, because here we were, mining Sybil’s traumatic death – the first death at Downton – all the time knowing we had to have a second one before the end.
† I wanted to mix horse-drawn and motor vehicles, because that was a clear sign of transition. It was good visually, to say that at this time a lot of the farmers wouldn’t have had a car, and they would use a trap as they always had. I had a great-aunt who ran a great open-fronted Daimler, with the chauffeur sitting in the rain, but she didn’t take it out for an ordinary errand, which would still be done in a pony and trap until her death in the early 1950s.
We always think of a car as easy and a trap more difficult because of the harnessing and getting the horse and everything else, but they thought differently. I remember I didn’t quite agree with Robert’s waistcoat in this scene, which had a sort of blue trim on the black. I didn’t feel he would wear anything so frivolous at his own daughter’s funeral, but no doubt someone will write in and say that this was absolutely standard mourning stuff.
The black armbands survived into my own time. My brothers and I wore them for my mother for about a month, but not for my father. She died in 1980, he died twenty years later, and by then armbands had gone. It’s always quite interesting to see a practice die in your own time. But it’s sad in a way – to me, at least.
2 We had just been staying with the Southesks in Scotland when I was writing this. We didn’t tell them, so when they were watching it they both jumped out of their skin.
3 An observation of my own. One of the elements of grief that I think people overlook is that sorrow is fantastically tiring. You get to the end of each day, when you’re in the grip of a really deep grief, absolutely whacked. Maybe it’s the churning around of your system, but anyway, I gave it to Violet to say because it’s true.
4 Not an original thought from me, but I believe losing a child at any age is the worst thing that can happen. We must all feel that, or almost all. My mother died in her sixties and my grandmother at the time was ninety-seven, but it still practically killed her. Well, it did kill her, really. She went straight downhill and died a couple of years later. You’d think there was a point when a parent was past that, but apparently not.
5 A cut for time… Carson forgets that the young maids would hardly have known Sybil, and he is not prepared for the casualness of twentieth- and twenty-first-century labour. People don’t feel now that they have plighted their troth with the company that employs them. It’s interesting how Americans seem to feel that loss more than we do. Over there, lots of companies have drives and they all go away for a camping weekend together to try and engender that kind of company spirit that used to be quite common, but I’m afraid that if you live in an era where you have to engender it artificially, it means it’s not going to work, whatever you do. Now, even when they’re happy and working hard, people are aware that in twen
ty years’ time they’ll probably be doing something else. As for Carson’s comments on the likelihood of women entering the professions, he is only revealing his own limitations.
6 Thomas’s feelings for Jimmy are now beginning to get out of control. The difference between someone being sympathetic towards you and fancying you is something that’s tripped almost all of us up at some point or another, whichever side we stand.
7 Here we have an irony because I know Isobel’s son is going to die before her. All of us involved are thinking about that; what we’re going to do with her character, how we’re going to develop Isobel beyond Matthew’s death, because we certainly wanted to keep Penelope Wilton. There was never any question we weren’t going to ask her to stay. So we would have to develop her in a slightly different way, and her principal relationship eventually will be with Violet, to replace her relationship with Matthew.
8 We enjoy our moments of bonding: Carson and Robert, Carson and Mary, Mary and Anna, and so on. They’re quite consciously displayed as couples, viewing problems sympathetically but from the slightly different perspectives of their contrasted positions, all of which underpins my own philosophy of ‘There but for fortune,’ which is key to the show. It is the chance of birth that has made Anna work for Mary and not the other way round, and these scenes underline that.
9 In these houses, the bedroom where the lady of the house sleeps is her room. Even if she is one half of a couple, it would be called her ladyship’s bedroom. If he chose to sleep in it that was his business, but he would have another bedroom. Here we cheat slightly, because we have him sleep in the dressing room every now and then, when, in real life, he would have had another bedroom to himself and either used it or, in many cases, not.
10 Cora now exposes Robert’s weakness here, in that he can’t let himself break free of the old ways and the old traditions. She’s right, really, and unfortunately she can’t resist rubbing it in. I don’t think she could be much more severe than she is here. I suspect I’m slightly on Robert’s side, because Sybil’s gone now and this behaviour won’t bring her back.
11 It’s tough to have children in a series like this, because the ageing is so difficult. You can take an actor through ten years and you don’t really have to age them much beyond greying up their temples a bit. But the changes in a year of a child’s life, from six months to eighteen months, say, mean that every time you see them you need a different kid. For each episode, you need to find a child that’s right for that moment, and maybe for two or three episodes more, then it’s on to another one. Branson’s announcement here that he is planning to leave is the first strand of a major theme through this series and the two that follow. So far, Robert doesn’t mind if Branson goes, but the child will complicate everything.
12 When Branson announces the Catholicism of his daughter, Robert just about holds it in, but clearly that’s going to be a big issue, as it would be for these people, for many years after this.
13 With these plots you have to decide how much you keep reminding the audience of the information. My ruling is, if the information doesn’t really matter then I don’t remind them of it. Here, what they need to know is that Craig wants to damage Bates, but the details can become monotonous if they’re repeated too often. There are people who disagree with me over this, and they will repeat the minutiae of a plot three or four times so that the audience is solidly in possession of all the facts. Happily, the producers of Downton, Liz Trubridge, Gareth Neame and I, all agree on the Downton casual release of information without explanation. We do this with contemporary incidents as well as storylines. If the audience wants to follow them up and go on the internet, fine, but if they don’t, that’s fine too.
14 I have always been puzzled by how this term started, but apparently, according to the internet, it all goes back to the spade. The incoming Protestants brought spades with footrests on both sides of the shaft, whereas the native Irish, who were generally Catholics, had spades with one footrest that was cut out of the shaft. So, if they dug with their left foot they were consequently left-footers. This seems a bit neat to me, but perhaps it’s true.
15 Robert assumes that the child’s chances are based on being Sybil’s daughter. It doesn’t yet occur to him that Branson could have anything of value to offer. That is the journey of discovery that he hasn’t begun to make yet. Mary disagrees with him on all counts here.
16 I don’t think there’s any question that Ivy is obviously much better suited to Jimmy than she is to Alfred. It’s only much later that she starts to realise what she’s lost. She sees then that Alfred may not be strolling down Pic-Piccadilly but he’s nevertheless more likely to own a house there, because he’s actually working at something with prospects. But she doesn’t see it here.
17 I love this line of Violet’s, which is a quote from an aunt, but actually Violet is trying to be helpful. She defends Cora for grieving, but she tries to remind Robert that they must observe the disciplines of their way of life. One of the strengths of the show is that we make it very clear that they are all living under constraints – the family quite as much as their employees – and these constraints are at times very difficult. But that’s part of the game they’re all playing, and these are the rules they’re playing by.
18 It is true that footmen had a far easier time of it, and the more footmen there were, the lighter the load. As living status symbols, they may have had duties, waiting at table, winding clocks, but a kitchen maid worked from the crack of dawn until she turned in, with very few breaks. It wasn’t a dead end, because the kitchen maid was on a ladder, first to be still-room maid and then undercook and eventually cook – that’s if she didn’t leave in her twenties and marry, like a lot of them did – but nevertheless, it was very tough. The footmen were the idle rich among the servants, and spent much of their time just sitting about.
19 I’m sad this was cut because ‘receipt’ is not used much in this sense now, but then it was the standard word for recipe. In fact, recipe was considered common. I would say that the transition was in the Fifties. My mother went on saying receipt through the Sixties and Seventies, but by then it had become rather an affectation. I’m always interested by the evolution of words. ‘Receipt’ was doomed because it became so ordinary in its other meaning: ‘Would you like a receipt?’ A meaning that is more used now than ever. Throughout history, when a word has two meanings, one will eventually dominate the other, until either the meaning will be adjusted or a new word will appear. ‘Recipe’, really, is a corruption of ‘receipt’, isn’t it? The final ‘t’ has been replaced by an ‘e’.
20 Salmon mousse always makes me laugh, because there was a time in the early Seventies when you seemed to get salmon mousse as a first course in more or less every house you went to, because that generation of women were still learning to be their own cooks. The pre-war cooks had finally tailed away in the Sixties, but today’s mass of private caterers hadn’t really begun. You quite often hired someone to come in from the village to serve or wash up, but you normally cooked yourself, and yet many of these women had grown up never having cooked anything. The bonus of salmon mousse was that it’s absolutely foolproof, and in fact it was one of the very first things I cooked. As time passed, I varied it to tuna mousse, but that didn’t make an enormous difference. It was the first course, I should think, at more or less every dinner I gave between the ages of about twenty and thirty. Unlike me, Mrs Patmore has the pride of a real cook.
21 Lamb Chops Portmanteau is a genuine recipe from that period. Food was rather fussy then, as it was right up to the era of Fanny Craddock in the 1950s and 1960s. Dishes were trimmed with green mayonnaise rosettes and all that sort of stuff. It took years for the rather cleaner cooking of the USA and the continent to dispose of those frills on lamb chops and all that niminy-piminy presentation. I used to be amused when I was young by the mutual disparagement by Americans and the English of each other’s cuisine. Americans would always tell you how terrible English food
was, and we would always say how terrible American food was. In fact, on the whole, the Americans were right and we were wrong. Our food after the war was not good. I suspect it was partly because of the departure of the cooks. A woman who was expected to do all the jobs formerly undertaken by nannies and cooks and housekeepers and cleaners can hardly be blamed for not excelling at any of the tasks. At any rate, for whatever reason, this was an uncomfortable period for English food, which started going downhill in the 1920s and probably reached its nadir in the 1950s, before our national menu began to rebuild itself.
22 Isobel is quite deliberately the first of the family group who begins to abandon the Edwardian customs. She starts having her supper on a tray in the drawing room, she stops changing for dinner, and so on. Violet, by contrast, continues to dress when she is alone and is served alone in the dining room by her butler. Both types existed and you find a version of both types now; those who embrace informality and change and those who do not. Today there is an obsession with comfort, the logical extension of which is that we should all be wearing trainer pants with elasticated waists, because there comes a moment when the discomfort, even of a tie, is almost impossible to endure. You see it in America with their dressing-down Fridays, and on the West Coast the universal preference is for jeans and a T-shirt. I take a dinner jacket to Los Angeles for red carpet evenings but other than these, it’s very rare that you will put it on. Again, the idea is that you must always be comfortable.
My argument with it is that it is the death of the Event, because it is impossible to make an evening into an event if everyone is sitting there in a T-shirt and jeans. So, as in almost everything in life, what you may gain on the roundabouts you certainly lose on the swings. A particularly strange anomaly, which you see on the West Coast, is where the women will dress up terrifically, to the nines, but the men don’t match them. The men are in leather jackets and jeans, and the women look as if they’re going to a ball at the Hofburg.
Downton Abbey, Series 3 Scripts (Official) Page 35