7 For Edith, this is part of the change in consciousness of women after the war. That’s what we’re using it for, but we also use it to demonstrate the dynamic of the family. Violet wants a favour in return for supporting Edith. I think we know Violet well enough to accept that if she really disapproved she wouldn’t support her at any cost, so she must be open to argument.
8 Alfred’s interest in cooking will become a major storyline. I used Béchamel here because it is a comparatively simple sauce, but it illustrates how even the plainest things can be cooked well or badly, and Alfred, like a true enthusiast, is fascinated by the minutiae. Naturally, Jimmy despises all this girly nonsense, but Carson approves of Alfred – even if cooking is outside his proper job description – because of his enthusiasm and hard work. He doesn’t really like Jimmy, who he thinks too clever for his own good.
9 It is true that you can have Anglican Godparents for a Catholic child as long as one Godparent is a Catholic. Our son Peregrine had six Godparents, and only one was Catholic, but one you must have.
10 It was not unusual for a cottage to be allotted in this way. As Robert owned the village it would just mean they were waiting for one to come up. To a certain extent these were dead men’s shoes. One of the extraordinary things in the 1950s and 1960s was the number of people who demolished many of their cottages because they couldn’t see any other use for them. Once they didn’t have the farm workers, the nannies and footmen that were expected to retire into them, they knocked them down rather than pay rates, and in the process succeeded in vastly devaluing their estates.
11 Normally we don’t let nannies speak, because we haven’t really got room to service them with narrative. And they were a separate group, as a rule. They didn’t eat with the other servants or sit with them much, because they were always in the nursery. It was one of those slightly uncomfortable, halfway jobs. She wasn’t quite a governess, who would probably be a lady, a curate’s daughter or something, when a nanny would not, but it was similar. She wasn’t just a servant, because she spent a lot of time with the family and she was also allowed to give the servants orders, which otherwise only the governess or the tutor could do. Actually, by the 1920s tutors had pretty well gone. The boys went off to boarding school early on. Only the girls stayed to be educated at home.
12 Matthew wants to involve Murray because he knows Murray agrees with him, so he’s trying to strengthen his own team. He didn’t consult Robert in advance because he didn’t want the order to be countermanded. Nevertheless, Robert thinks it’s an incredible liberty to ask the family lawyer to come up without telling him. We agree with Robert, but on the other hand we also know that the estate needs Matthew to get his way, so we should, in good Downton fashion, be completely torn between the two of them.
13 To carry the main dish was the first footman’s job, who at this moment is Alfred, but Thomas and Daisy support Jimmy, who feels he has a right to the position. Here, Jimmy shows that his soul is not entirely spotless in that he’s prepared to set Alfred up, which he does by misarranging the cutlery.
14 Living in a village is essentially living in a political minefield, and I like to remind people that, far from being a straightforward rural paradise, it is actually much harder to stay out of trouble in a village than it is in a London street. Someone like Ethel, with a known past, in those days (or perhaps in these) would just not be allowed to forget.
15 I think we’ve set up Edith’s tea with her editor sufficiently for the public to be aware that a major character is coming in. Isobel’s assumption that Violet will support Robert and try to deter Edith is the customary assumption of the dedicated liberal that everyone else is illiberal. In this case she would normally have been proved right but, contrarily, Violet decides to support Edith.
16 What one must remember about the life of a servant in those days is that even if you were working in a nice house for nice people and the whole thing wasn’t bad at all, you still lived your life by permission. Arthur Inch, who was the butler advising me on Gosford Park – a lovely man – couldn’t believe it when he was first in the Army, training to go to war. They’d get to five in the afternoon and then they’d be told: ‘Right. That’s it. Tomorrow we’ll study such and such.’ Eventually, he realised it was up to him to arrange his own evening. If some of them were going to the pub or whatever, he’d join them, but he told me that for the first few weeks it felt wild, because he’d been living by permission since he was fourteen. He went back into service after the war, but he said there were a lot of people who just couldn’t go back. They’d got used to deciding how they were going to spend their own time.
17 Now Matthew raises again the possibility that there’s something wrong. I have always been interested in how when you’re young you are terrified of anyone getting pregnant and then, for many people (although not for me, actually – Peregrine was born nine months and two minutes after we left the church – but for many friends), it is two or three or even four years before it happens. It can take much longer than you think.
I was sorry they cut ‘All doctors pretend to know more than they do’, as that is my voice. Nothing irritates me more than doctors talking as if they know everything and you know nothing, particularly when you’re dealing with a disease like cancer, when nobody knows anything. And how they hate to be questioned. They’ll do anything to avoid being questioned, because they just want you to say, ‘Yes, Gov,’ and go home. Like school teachers who want to give you a hundred lines if you don’t do what they say.
18 There were lots of popular English films at this time, and although the names of the actors – people like John Stuart and Chili Bouchier – have rather been forgotten, they were big stars then. There was no language barrier, obviously, and in fact one of the big changes when sound came at the end of the 1920s was that suddenly everyone was up a tree. Not just actors with foreign accents, like Vilma Banky, but also producers and distributors. Before then you could take a German film, write some different subtitles and release it in the normal way of things, and so there was a real international feel to the film industry that sound would destroy. Anyway, there were English films and English silent stars, and one of them, Ivy Close, whom Alfred admires in The Worldlings, was the great-grandmother of Gareth Neame, our producer.
I think with Ivy’s lack of interest in Alfred I’m probably making a melancholy point for all people who were plain when young. Like me. If only she’d seen his potential she would have been glad to get off with him, and I suppose, subconsciously, I was trying to be revenged on all those pretty girls who didn’t want to dance with me at the end of the 1960s.
19 If Jimmy had just woken up to find Thomas kissing him and kicked him off the bed, then for him to take it any further would seem to me unbelievable. The last thing he’d want would be to introduce the subject as a topic for the others. He would have told Thomas, ‘If you mention this to another living person you’re a dead man,’ and that would have been the end of it. But by making Alfred a witness we force Jimmy into a public response, which can only be the most hostile one imaginable. Once Alfred has seen, then Jimmy has no choice. From then on, he must behave as if this is the most horrible thing that has ever happened in the history of the world. So I have to set up the question Alfred needs to ask about Ivy in order to bring him into the bedroom when he gets back from the cinema. In Jimmy’s head, once Alfred has seen him and Thomas apparently kissing, he knows he will go downstairs the following morning and tell everyone. So Jimmy must act first.
20 Jimmy now makes the pathetic but entirely predictable gesture of becoming aggressively heterosexual in order to make his statement, and so he starts flirting with Ivy. To Carson, this is hideous to see, but that is a young man’s awkwardness. He has to prove his own ‘normal’ sexuality in order to kick Thomas even further into touch.
21 Gregson is played by Charles Edwards, a very good actor and for me a real leading man. He’s got that gentlemanly decency that used to be the stock in trade of Jack H
awkins, Kenneth More and countless others, but there aren’t many of them now.
22 It is important in this story that Gregson genuinely likes Edith; there’s no side to it. He’s not a social climber at all. He comes from an educated, upper-middle-class background, much the same as Isobel Crawley and Matthew, really. He’s not more interested in Edith because she’s an earl’s daughter, and I think it is one of the first times that she has been in a relationship where that side of it has no significance at all.
I mention The Lady several times. It was already the principal publication for domestic service recruiting and had been for some time, so I thought it more fun to use a real magazine. And Rules, also real and an old favourite of mine from my youth, is just around the corner from the magazine’s offices.
23 For Matthew, the difficulty is to find a way forward that will carry all the people who need to be carried. Sometimes in a business you can’t persuade them and you may have to get rid of some employees and replace them. But with these estates, the people you had to carry with you were the members of the family, and they weren’t replaceable. A lot of houses went down because the key people couldn’t change. Often the agent, the lawyers, sometimes even the wives and children knew that things would have to be different, but the owner just couldn’t get it, which is what Matthew is afraid of when it comes to Robert. Here we also have the plan of buying out tenants, which I use to define Branson as someone other than just a troublemaker who’s run off with a daughter of the house. We need to believe he is intelligent and capable of addressing problems. As a simple Irish rebel there wasn’t enough scope for him, dramatically.
24 Because of the constant soap opera of any family, there are always new incidents coming up and in my experience you can never quite tell how the family alliances will play out. Every member is capable of changing sides.
25 Edith’s hideous awareness of her own humiliation is common to us all at a certain stage of our lives. Rather like when you break your leg, you can’t understand how everyone else is moving around so easily. In youth, you always think everyone’s talking about you, and in middle age you don’t care what they’re saying; it’s only when you’re old that you realise they’re not talking or thinking about you at all.
26 Sometimes in life you diddle around a subject for a long time and then you suddenly think, I’ve got to have this terrible conversation and only when I’ve had it will we all be able to move on to the next square, and that is what I feel Matthew is doing here. He hoped Jarvis would go along with everything without being punched, but it hasn’t happened, so it’s time to act. I also feel, as a matter of fact, that neither Murray nor Matthew thinks Jarvis is the man to lead the reforms. He’s just not capable of it and that’s what they’ve come to. I don’t believe Matthew for a moment thinks Jarvis has been dishonest or corrupt, he’s just inefficient – and worse than inefficient, he belongs to an earlier time. Even Robert has calmed down and now sees that things have to move forward.
27 We found this very good actor, Ruairi Conaghan, who looks like a plumper version of Allen Leech. His role was to represent what Branson had come from, so that the audience would be quite clear about the journey he has made. The death of Sybil means that the negotiation of that journey has become more difficult, because she was the bridge between the two worlds and she’s now been removed from the equation. Mary is behaving correctly and comes downstairs to extend her invitation, but she isn’t really a match for Kieran Branson, because once people don’t play the game according to the rules she finds it very difficult to deal with them.
I had a girlfriend once whose uncle was charming but very, very vague, and one day he arrived at a shooting party dressed in fairly old tweeds. He looked pretty rough carrying his gun, and he didn’t have anyone with him, so the butler assumed he was a valet-loader and pointed the way downstairs. Off he went to the servants’ quarters where they asked if he wanted some tea. Somehow they, too, got the impression that he was his own valet and they showed him a picture of his wife in a magazine and asked if it was a good likeness. He replied that she was prettier in real life, and this went on for quite a long time until someone looked in from the family and told him to come upstairs. The sad result was that the servants wouldn’t serve him for the rest of the party, because they thought he’d done it as a joke, which he absolutely hadn’t. Anyway, that was what gave me the idea for Kieran’s arrival.
28 By introducing change you become responsible for its resulting in improvement, which is why many people shrink away from it, but this is going to be Branson’s opportunity. Again, this whole set-up was written in the sure and certain knowledge that Matthew was about to quit the scene, so we needed Branson to step up to the mark, so to speak. For the same reason, we make Matthew and Mary tremendously together and happy now, having had a certain amount of dissension in the first five episodes, written before I knew he was going. After Episode Five we realised they were not going to be together for very much longer, so we could afford a period of perfect unity. If Dan Stevens had not left the series then we would have had to find other ways to make them unhappy.
29 Automobile refurbishment. I don’t blame Kieran for wanting to raise his own status. Why shouldn’t he? Obviously the picture he is painting for a Crawley grandchild is terrible for Robert, but one of the great phenomena of the twentieth century has been social mobility – alas, rather frozen now. Of course, people always think social mobility means moving up, and it is good for people to maximise their own potential and achieve what they can achieve, but that said there is also the counter-pull of down, and when there isn’t an enormous amount of inherited money – true in many middle- and upper-class families – and if there is no great ambition, there is nothing to hold you up in a much more changeable society. These days, you can easily have a situation where someone can be Lord Tiddlypush while his second cousin is working in a garage.
30 Here we have Isobel about to be told that Violet is advertising to replace Isobel’s cook, which is rather extraordinary. But I don’t blame Violet. Her main motive may be to rid the village and the family of a potential scandal, but she genuinely does not believe Ethel will have a new life until she gets away from the scene of her downfall. Her position therefore is, I think, perfectly defensible.
31 This is an important scene between Violet, Edith, Isobel and Mrs Hughes. When you want to have a cross-class scene like this, where they are all essentially equal contributors, you don’t really want to put it into a sitting room, because then either Mrs Hughes is sitting, which would be unbelievable, or she is standing and they are sitting, which would be awkward. Nor would we believe Violet in the kitchen, but by putting it into the hall, they’re all standing without surrendering any status. Mrs Hughes and Violet are simply two women talking to each other. I love the fact that Mrs Hughes has heard of The Scarlet Letter, but Violet hasn’t.
32 Carson’s initial instinct, which I think is truthful, is to try always to contain potential damage. That is in his blood and his first instruction would therefore be to tell no one, but despite his resolve he will soon have to admit the situation is hopeless, because once O’Brien knows anything, then it’s out.
33 When Violet says that Jarvis was Robert’s father’s man – ‘To him, you were always the young master, never the chief’ – she is speaking the truth. I’ve seen that in several houses of this type. Until they get their own people into all the key positions the next generation is not really in charge, and the first ten or fifteen years can often be a probationary period before they’re actually running things. So that is drawn from life. Violet obviously thinks of Branson for the job because, if he takes it, then they’ve solved Sybbie’s future, but I hope we made it believable by this stage that it’s a job he could do. Certainly it is true that Branson’s experience of farming would have been much more practical than Jarvis’s.
34 This scene is very key to me, because the subtext of Thomas’s homosexual story is that it was very difficult to be gay in the 1
920s. You took your life in your hands all the time, but what is also true, which I think modern sentimentality sometimes refuses to admit, is that normal, decent, nice people would often take a position on it that would seem to us hostile and unjust. Carson’s prejudice would not have been in the least unusual. Obviously there were people who weren’t prejudiced, but there were plenty who were, and Carson’s revulsion, when we know he is a decent, upright man trying to do his best, would be typical of what the Thomases of this world would have had to put up with. I felt it was useful to have a naked expression of the loathing that they had to live among. Carson later shows some sympathy for Thomas, because I think what happens to Carson during this story is that something he has hated generically has taken a human face, which is always the best argument against extremism. This is why the one thing I’m always against is judging anyone according to a type. It doesn’t even matter if it is something positive. All type judgements are worthless, because they generalise the individual. Here, what happens to Carson is that eventually, although he doesn’t approve, he comes to see that it is not Thomas’s fault.
35 Father Dominic was based on Father Dominic Milroy, the priest at Ampleforth who suggested I might become an actor. A rather adventurous piece of advice in 1965, I may say, when it was like suggesting someone become a professional gambler or an astronaut. I’d done a couple of plays and he suggested I consider the theatre as a career. Of course, if my father had known I was being given this advice he would have absolutely hit the roof, but I had enough sense not to tell him. Years later, when they put me on This Is Your Life, Emma got Father Dominic down from Yorkshire to come on the show. He is a marvellous fellow.
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