Downton Abbey, Series 3 Scripts (Official)

by Julian Fellowes

  7 Branson’s struggle through the rest of this series and into Seasons Four and Five is his fear of being turned into a Crawley and being made to subscribe to their ways of dressing and their opinions and to activities that are not natural to him. But in another way he isn’t really acknowledging how he is changing as a person. He sees them differently in some ways, which he doesn’t yet want to admit. That struggle will dominate his story from now on.

  8 O’Brien shows that malice knows no bounds.

  9 ‘Keep smiling, and never look as if you disapprove.’ That is from my mother, because she always hated the fact she couldn’t really speak any language other than English, and with my father as a diplomat, particularly early on in the marriage, she had constantly been in situations where everyone was talking French and all she could do was smile and nod and hope that it made sense. For this reason, we were all sent away at thirteen or fourteen to learn French. She would even find houses where English was not spoken. She didn’t mind so much if the father spoke English, but she hated it when the mother did, feeling that she would just use us to practise on.

  I was sent off to the Dordogne, to a very nice family living in a beautiful little château with a Roman tower. My bedroom was at the top of it, and all the doors and windows were curved, the windows being made of ancient concave glass. The main section of the circle was the bedroom and the last segment was the bathroom. I had only just arrived when I went into the bathroom, opened the window and it slipped from my hand and shot back against the wall and broke, falling four floors into the stable yard. Crash! Crash! Bang! Crash! I remember just wanting to be dead. I didn’t know these people, I’d come straight upstairs, I hadn’t spoken to any of them and I’d broken this clearly incredibly precious, specially moulded glass window, which was presumably the original from the eighteenth century. I just sat down under the window in the corner against the floor, closed my eyes and tried to make it go away. Funnily enough, they must have been kind to me because I have no memory of what happened after. I stayed there for two or three weeks, came back sort of speaking French, then I went again later and we always stayed on friendly terms. Life.

  10 I don’t like to make it too sentimental.

  11 Now we are talking proper management and involving Mary. That will be quite an important part of what leads on from the death of Matthew, so we must build Mary’s interest in running the estate from this point on. And now that the Matthew/Mary team is not going to be at loggerheads with Robert, it’s going to be Mary herself who is at loggerheads with her father. We start to play that here.

  12 Mary has been to London, but we don’t quite know why – nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

  13 For a senior servant not to have a reference from their most recent job was employment death. I am not saying he couldn’t pick up a job as a waiter or something, but as far as his career trajectory is concerned, as a proper servant he would be absolutely finished.

  14 Alastair Bruce, our historical advisor, and I discussed fictional but reasonably noble-sounding names. As Rose was going to be the daughter of a peer, we thought it was probably better that there was no confusion with real Scottish people with those tribal names; the McDonalds and the like. In the end, we thought MacClare was quite convincing. There is no such name as MacClare. Having said that, someone will write in saying my name is John MacClare.

  15 Carson is being forced to do something he believes to be unfair and unjust, which we should be absolutely clear about. For me, there is a poignancy in Thomas’s refusal to see Jimmy as the bad guy. He’s not the main bad guy, but he’s bad enough in my book.

  16 I felt it would be quite wrong to show Mr and Mrs Bates going into some kind of Ideal Home cottage. Estate cottages were pretty primitive much further into the century, and indeed on one estate where we stay in the West Country, something like eighty cottages had to be given bathrooms and plumbing and electricity during the 1970s. But while the cottage is basic, for Anna, they are on their own. They’ve got their own house. That is what matters.

  17 Rose is quite manipulative at this stage. She just wants to get to London without her parents’ knowing.

  18 Mrs Hughes defines herself as a reasonably just person because she is not tremendously on anyone’s side, and even Thomas is capable of seeing that. I felt that he had to have someone in the authority structure whom he could talk to, and it seemed to me that Mrs Hughes was the one he would think most likely to give him a reasonably sympathetic hearing.

  19 I was sorry this went because I always like to remind people that these characters are working in service. This is a workplace drama. Here we have Ethel doing her work. We know she’s been a tart, but here she’s working as a cook and producing menus like any cook.

  20 Here we have one of our invisible characters, Edith’s new maid who isn’t working out. And we plant more drama. Matthew wants to go to London, so Mary needs to check what train Edith is planning to come back on. ‘Can you promise not to let him catch an earlier one?’ Knowing Mary’s feelings about Edith, to ask a favour must be a clear indication that she is fairly desperate.

  21 Should Branson and Sybbie move out to the agent’s house? As I’ve said before, I’ve always had a problem with those American series where everyone lives in one house, even though they’ve got seventeen billion. Nevertheless, dramatically, you don’t want them to keep moving into different houses. So we’ve stopped Matthew and Mary moving away from Downton. Now I’ve got to stop Branson and Sybbie going into a different house and find a reason to do so. And it seemed to me the only emotional excuse I could find was if he were convinced it would be good for the child to stay.

  22 What I am sure was true at that time was that people were protected by their own prejudice. Because everyone knew they’d disapprove frightfully, they weren’t told. Carson in a long life of service has lived and worked alongside several homosexual men, but none has given himself away to him. Whereas Mrs Hughes, as an essentially sympathetic person, has not been so protected. She is aware that she has come across several other people who are the same. That’s what we explore here. Carson is uncomfortable with being blackmailed, there’s no question about that, but he doesn’t see how they can let James go to the police, given that his motivation is at all costs to keep the family out of the papers. That’s the nightmare. And in fact it would become more of a nightmare the more intrusive the press became as the century wore on.

  23 As we have said, chauffeurs lived outside the house and brought the car to the front when it was required. Of course, in real life the staff would have known Mr Stark well, but we’d taken one chauffeur (Branson) into the house and we didn’t really want to replace him as a character. So we now make references to Mr Stark and every now and then we see Mr Stark, but we never get to know him.

  24 This is all part of Branson’s struggle for personal definition. It’s always a choice when you go into a different environment. I was talking to an actress recently who had been a deb when I was a debs’ delight and we had both gone on the stage later on. She’d reinvented herself and, without ever lying, suggested that she came from quite a different background to fit in more. She adopted the politics and the mores of show business as it was in the early Seventies. I made the opposite choice; I didn’t do any of that. Looking back, she felt her decision had been right professionally but more complicated privately, whereas mine, not to present a different picture of who I was, had taken me towards a good marriage and the rest of it, but erected a lot of hurdles in my work. People have to deal with this. You must work out who you want to be; how much do you want to fit in and how much do you want to change? Actually, in retrospect, I think I was rather inflexible. My difficulty was that I simply didn’t believe in the popular politics in showbiz at that time. I didn’t see how you could support a party that couldn’t manage the economy. I failed to realise it was all about club membership and I was refusing to be a member. I suppose it would have helped if I hadn’t been very political, but I was, and it was a problem
I had to overcome. That is what Branson is going through. How far does he have to go in order for everyone to be comfortable, and how uncomfortable will he make himself in the process?

  25 Samantha Bond (Rosamund) is a very busy actress, so we always have to check whether or not she’s up for an episode or two. On the whole, if you see her at all she’s got something real to do in that episode. She’s never an also-ran. Her role in the family essentially means they don’t have to open Grantham House every time they go to London. She’s got a house that is easily big enough to accommodate them. She also has money, and to host them in the capital is a way of staying at the centre of the group. In my own life I had a grandmother with a flat in Queen’s Gate, and since it was very central we would leave things there and sleep the night there and meet each other there, and I would drop something off and my mother could pick it up in the afternoon, and so on. So she became a kind of ‘Forsyte Change’ for us, and that’s really what Rosamund is based on. She’s a convenience in a way, but I don’t think she minds. I believe she is fully aware of the role she plays.

  26 Gregson gives Edith permission to be herself, which is what makes her fall in love with him. That seems to me to be realistic. We have only ever seen Edith being essentially thwarted or ignored, and the mere fact that he is interested in her opinions is probably the most seductive thing about him.

  27 Rose is revealing the real Rose now and her true reason for coming to London. We present how wild she is in a slightly veiled way; whether she sleeps with this man or not we never really know. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. She certainly flirts like billy-o and her mother sent her to Yorkshire to get rid of him, so they have all fallen for her tricks.

  Originally, Rose gave a particular number in Warwick Square to the taxi driver, but the production team got worried that the number exists and someone who lives there might take offence, which I thought was unnecessary, like a directive from Health and Safety. But I lost, so I had to take the number out and leave her simply saying, ‘Warwick Square, please.’ But actually you often don’t say a number until you get there, so I didn’t mind much.

  28 Mrs Hughes makes the distinction about not knowing officially, which I believe is key. My parents were always very keen on this. When we were older and we used to bring girlfriends down to the country, we were never given the same bedroom. Ever. I once asked my mother about it. My brother Rory had arrived with a girl and I said, ‘Why don’t you put them in the same room? You know they are going to sleep together.’ She said, ‘I may know it, but I don’t know it officially.’ And that was that.

  29 The Blue Dragon is the first of the new clubs that Downton characters visit, but they were being opened all over London by people like the famous Mrs Meyrick, who managed to marry all her daughters into the peerage, despite spending quite a lot of time in jug as an illegal seller of drink and God knows what else besides. These clubs were a new kind of night life. There had been bars before the war, and places you would take your girlfriend, with a private dining room and a couch behind the curtain. But now respectable women were allowed in, they could go dancing without a chaperone, so the clubs were part of that general loosening of the stays. Most of their time was spent dancing in hotels: Claridge’s, the Ritz and the rest all had top dance bands, and you went to one of them perhaps two or three times a week. But at times that was not enough and you wanted something more cutting edge. That’s where the clubs came in. The most famous was probably the Embassy, because it was the one that the Prince of Wales enjoyed.

  30 We wanted to feature some black musicians here, because the 1920s was the moment when black musicians and singers really became fashionable and popular. It seemed a nice visual statement that the world is becoming more recognisably modern. Later, in Season Four, we would develop this theme into a major storyline.

  31 It always fascinates me the number of sentient adults, men and women, who will tell you how incredibly unhappy the person they have just run off with was in their marriage. You always want to say, ‘But if they were so incredibly unhappy, why were they still together?’ I asked someone the other day if her lover was living with his wife when their affair started. She said, ‘Oh yes, but it was completely finished.’ When the truth is that if he was still living with her, then it wasn’t finished. It is the one rather objectionable fact that they never want to address.

  32 For Matthew, of course, this place is hell; for Rosamund, it’s double hell; but it’s a pretty truthful version of what was going on then. Matthew and Rose forge a sort of alliance here that will pay off in the Special.

  33 I was always rather fascinated by that sort of upbringing. When I was young, a few of my contemporaries were still living something similar. For most people – most British people, anyway – it really has gone now, but in the 1950s and 1960s there were still children in England being taken down to the drawing room for an hour after tea. I can’t pretend they have grown up any more messed up than the rest of us.

  34 A Yorkshire phrase that I’ve always rather liked. I am assuming it was already going in the 1920s, but I haven’t got proof of that. As nobody has been in touch to complain, I think I’m in the clear.

  35 ‘Gobby’ is a Yorkshire term for someone who speaks his mind noisily and continually. I used to hear quite a lot of these northern phrases during my school years at Ampleforth, and my grandmother’s family is based in North Yorkshire, which used to be called the North Riding. I am often asked why we set Downton in that part of Yorkshire, and various houses there have claimed to be the inspiration for it, but the truth is, ITV wanted it set in the North and the North Riding was the one part of the North I knew well.

  36 They are all disturbed by the fact that Thomas is not to have a reference. As working servants that would be more or less the worst thing anyone could do to you, so it is a very, very serious business. Jimmy, of course, does not want to be chivvied over it because he is responsible for the trouble.

  37 We are not specific about what Matthew is being tested for, as it wouldn’t be very Downton to go into detail. He wants to know why Mary isn’t getting pregnant and so he has had some tests run. That is quite enough for us to be going on with.

  38 There is a modern idea that if you are in love with someone you want to tell them everything, but I don’t believe that. I always remember the story of a husband whose wife had died and they were going through her things and they found this box, and the son said, ‘Oh, it’s her false teeth.’ And the father said, ‘Don’t show me. I never knew in life; it would be disloyal to know in death.’ I thought that was rather good. In fact, if Matthew hadn’t found her at Doctor Ryder’s, I doubt she would have told him anything at all.

  39 I have already talked about this loosening up for unmarried women. And because they were suddenly without chaperones for so much of the time and allowed to go out with young men for the evening, in the end exactly what all those Victorian chaperones were afraid of did start to happen – not as it would later, once the pill had essentially liberated women sexually in the 1960s, but love affairs for the unmarried and posh were no longer totally unknown, as they had been in the previous century. Of course, it was still a big thing, because it was a very, very bad move to get pregnant, so that did keep them in check, but it was beginning to kick off.

  40 There is something in Kevin Doyle (Molesley), a kind of pathos, a dignified sorrow, that I now write for and he mines. It is interesting to see as, before Downton, he usually played serial killers, so we have released the lovable, sensitive side of him.

  41 Robert’s attitude to all this is very like my father’s (he can often be glimpsed in Robert’s opinions). There was a good quote from an MP not long ago when the tabloids, in their charity and mercy, decided to reveal that his brother was gay. The journalists asked the MP whether he objected, to which he replied: ‘Why should I object? It’s like objecting to rain.’ I think my father felt that; it was like objecting to rain. And that’s the attitude that I’ve given Robert.

>   42 This line brought me a lot of letters, I can tell you.

  43 At one point I thought I was going to do something with Aunt Agatha, but then I came to the conclusion that a battle-axe might trample on Maggie Smith’s feet. She’d have to be comedic, and once she was a comedic old battle-axe then isn’t what Maggie’s doing much better than that? So I never went forward with it. But anyway, she is a background character here. Violet is pretending she found out legitimately.

  44 I always think it is interesting emotionally to make a character in a drama sympathise with another character whom they don’t like, if they’ve been betrayed or wrongfully accused. Just as in life, you may not like someone, but that doesn’t alter the fact that in certain instances you’re on their side. Besides which, when they’re very young most people feel they have to dislike anyone who dislikes them, but as you get older you don’t necessarily dislike people who dislike you, and that is really what we are exploring here. Of course, Bates is right in thinking that Thomas will know something about O’Brien that can be used against her.

  45 Robert is making the mistake a lot of the intelligentsia of our own day make regularly, which is to assume anything that is run commercially and makes a profit has no merit. A film that is popular must be a bad film, because a good film would not have a large audience. A popular book is a trashy book, because a good book would not be easily accessible, and so on. This prejudice has really dominated our artistic life to quite a degree for a long time. For me, it is the position that has held the film industry back in this country, and as a result it is not level pegging with the national film industries of many other lands.