16 They kiss on one cheek only. I had a bit of trouble on Gosford Park when once or twice the actresses would kiss on two cheeks, forgetting that the custom only came here in the 1970s from the continent. Personally, I prefer the one-cheek kiss because I feel you get it over without banging noses and general awkwardness, but that isn’t how it’s done these days. It is a bit of a giveaway in period drama when you see the double kiss.
17 The Ghillies’ Ball is one of those moments where, like a Servants’ Ball, you can, quite genuinely, mix the two elements in the house: the family and the staff. It was on the whole a wilder affair than the English Servants’ Ball, where the family left comparatively early in the evening. Not so those at the Ghillies’ Ball. It was run on whisky and half of them would be as drunk as lords. Queen Victoria in particular enjoyed these gatherings very much, because she didn’t often get to witness people just having a good time in an abandoned way. Of course, like so many of those Scottish traditions that underpinned her love affair with the Highlands, the Ghillies’ Ball really began in the 1840s. Here, I knew we would get some mileage out of it, because it certainly wouldn’t be just another Servants’ Ball.
18 The character of Rose MacClare is now going to come into the series proper, and this episode will deliver the reason why she moves to Downton for Season Four. Of course, in a way, she replaced Sybil as the young woman in the family mix, but Lily James, who plays her, has her own very distinctive style (by now spotted by Walt Disney to star in their new version of Cinderella), and we felt she would be a very rewarding inclusion in her own right, which she has proved.
19 This scene was cut, which was rather a shame because it was shot very well as a spooky, haunted, Dracula’s castle moment with a nice colour to it. But you always know scenes that add atmosphere but not much else will normally go in the edit. The mention of Ariadne shows that Molesley is quite well read and later, in the fifth series, he will lend Daisy a book on the reign of Queen Anne. For me, Molesley is someone who, with a different education and a different class system operating, could have gone far. He’s a clever man, but the system has defeated him.
20 Lesley Nicol wanted a little love interest after three years of chastity and decorum, and Mr Tufton arrives with that in mind, and we were very lucky that the marvellous John Henshaw agreed to play him. Of course, Mrs Patmore is aware that she’s being chatted up, but she doesn’t mind a bit.
21 There’s a point I wanted to make here. You often hear people talking about these houses, and this life, as if everything was done in the same way everywhere. They would always gather in the library before dinner and in the drawing room afterwards. It was always the second footman who wound the clock… Except that there was no ‘always’. Every household was different and had its different customs. Here we have the servants eating an early supper before the family dinner, which is how I managed it in Gosford Park. That was done in some houses, but in others they had a late supper at about half past ten when the work for the day was done for most of them. This is what we do at Downton. Arthur Inch, my advisor on Gosford, had experienced both. He said he miles preferred eating late, because then the feed was a jolly one where everyone, apart from the valets and maids, had finished their work. So they could finally relax.
By calling O’Brien Miss Grantham I went on with the tradition of the visiting maids and valets taking the names from their employers. You have to remember it just made things much less complicated for the staff of the house they were staying in.
22 Like Robert, I enjoy pipers circling the table, which still goes on in some houses, although interestingly Scotland is now much more left-wing than England, with a war on the landed classes being waged by the Scottish Parliament. But at the time, before and after the First World War, they changed more slowly from the old ways, because it was a very rooted way of life. It may be that the clan system affected the relationship between the classes, which was rather different from that in England. Serving the chief of your own clan is more dignified and less uncomfortable than just being a gun for hire to be taken on as a footman. All of which gave a slightly different taste to it, which Queen Victoria, for one, enjoyed very much. She liked the greater ease with the tenants and the farming people. With John Brown she’d visit the crofters’ houses for cups of tea, which she really wouldn’t have done much of at Windsor.
23 Now we start to set up an unhappy upper-class marriage between Susan and Shrimpie. When we talk about how that generation had so much less divorce and so much more discipline – all of which is true – we can forget that the price of it was people having to live for many, many years with partners they couldn’t bear. It was a price that, increasingly during the Twenties, they were unwilling to pay. And as houses got smaller and couples lived in greater intimacy, it became even harder for them to stick it out. I think one of the toughest things for young couples now is that they usually have to live in such constricted surroundings. I always say to my nieces or their contemporaries that they should try to find one little area – even if it’s a bit of the kitchen – which is their own, a private space, where they can do what they want. Both halves of a couple should have the same. Otherwise you’re always being jostled and cramped. Admittedly, Susan and Shrimpie are not very cramped at Inverarary, but they are isolated, which is another thing. We begin to understand that, by this point, she can’t even be polite to him.
24 ‘He loves me, he loves me not.’ But it was cut.
25 Here, Carson is demonstrating not double values but that his disapproval of Branson does not undermine the fact that Branson is the son-in-law of the house and must be accorded the treatment the son-in-law of the house is entitled to. But it’s all obviated by the fact that he’s going out to the pub.
26 Isobel supports Branson’s change in his social position. But because she supports it and she is essentially a liberal, it doesn’t mean she’s not aware of the journey that he’s had to make. I felt this was important, because there are moments when there’s a danger that Isobel can appear so modern that she is not aware of the society in which she is living. Here, she clearly understands the problems that he faces. She congratulates him on managing the transition and, in doing so, defines herself as his ally.
27 I was sorry this went because I think it was quite complicated. By coming in downstairs Branson is breaking the rules, which Mrs Hughes does not agree with. But her motives aren’t unkind, which is not quite true of Carson. So when Carson attacks Branson her instinct is to defend him, but we know she thinks Carson is right and Branson should stick to the rules of the game.
28 That is a reference to my wife Emma, who is passionate on this subject, and the phrase ‘Scottish country dancing’ makes her see red. The correct term is ‘reeling’ and that’s all there is to it.
29 It’s the disadvantage of pipers that they go round the house at seven in the morning.
30 Nield is a name taken from a friend of mine from my time in Kingussie (filming Monarch of the Glen). Shirley Nield and her husband have remained pals since that time. Emma collects different versions of the famous ‘Your Country Needs You’ poster featuring her great-uncle, Lord Kitchener. And whenever they see one used in the Scottish press or a magazine or even locally, they always send it down to her. In short, they are very nice people and so I use their surname here.
31 This is the difference between stalking and shooting. You are performing a service, which you’re not really doing when you shoot a game bird. If you hit a pheasant and it comes down, then hopefully someone will eat it, but that’s it. With a stag, you are preserving the health of the herd and so the kill is important, and a clean kill is the best, all of which Robert endorses. I like that sense of consideration for the game. If you shoot in France, for instance, the birds are all laid out in geometric patterns at the end of the day in front of the house, so the guns can pay their respects to them. It’s like an instant memorial and there is something appealing about giving the birds their due. So I hope this scene is full of res
pect for the deer. That is what was intended.
32 Phoebe Nicholls, who plays Susan Flintshire, didn’t like saying that line. She thought it rather insulting, but I felt her character would not feel much respect for foreign climes or customs, certainly not the kind of respect that Phoebe feels today.
33 The news had just been broken to me that, to my great sorrow, Siobhan Finneran was leaving us. She was already one of the leads on Benidorm, and what with children and various other matters, she felt she couldn’t keep doing both series. I was very, very sorry, as I thought her creation of O’Brien was one of the best things in our show.
34 I mentioned earlier the famous letter written by Lady Curzon from India saying how hard it was to fasten buttons because her fingers were slippery with sweat. How did they manage it? Getting into those corsets, interlined and padded, the men in stiffened uniform, the women laced into whale bone and four or five layers, all under the boiling Indian sun – I think it was an extraordinary discipline and I doubt we could do it today.
35 Mary is a snob, which is why her journey towards Branson is interesting; she is, though, able to see beyond her own snobbery, all of which was quite deliberate. Of course she’s not interested in Gregson’s sketching, only in his fishing, which gives him a better claim to be a member of their tribe. Mary reminds me of Cynthia French-McGrath in M. J. Farrell’s novel The Rising Tide, when she asks if anyone has seen her son. ‘He’s in the orchard, reading,’ says one of the guests. ‘Oh dear,’ sighs Cynthia. ‘I do hope he’s not going to be clever.’ That self-conscious and rather smug philistinism was absolutely typical of the upper class at that time.
36 For Branson, the neutral setting of the pub for a talk with Edna feels more natural than it would have done on a staircase at Downton. He is seduced into intimacy by the situation, as she knew he would be.
37 Anna is nervous of the Ghillies’ Ball for a simple reason, as we later learn. She doesn’t know how to dance any of the reels, because she’s never travelled. We make the point that a lady’s maid who was only a housemaid often didn’t travel, and real ladies’ maids would often double up to look after a mother and her daughters if it was for a few days somewhere, rather than bringing too cumbersome a party.
38 No drinks. Essentially Robert is enjoying being transported back to 1880 for a blessed few days, and at Duneagle they do observe the customs of fifty years earlier. Here, Gregson comes in looking normal and being normal. One of the things that interests me is when posh people pretend they find the upper middle classes very different from themselves when, in most cases, they’re not different at all. It’s an invented difference, but they want to preserve it in their mind. You see less of it now, but thirty years ago there was still a lot of pretence that when a nice banker and his wife came in for a drink from the village they were almost talking a different language, which of course they weren’t.
39 It’s important in a show like this to keep these prickly relationships, like Violet and Cora, from going past the point of no return, because then they’re much less useful dramatically. However much they may fall out, you must never let the fall-out be to a degree where they cannot mend their fences for the purposes of another story.
40 This is true. The summer nights aren’t ever really dark in the Highlands. It never goes much further than a sort of dusk.
41 By giving Rose a peppermint they are setting up a later alliance.
42 Clarkson is starting to dream that he might have another life with Isobel, who is, after all, a doctor’s widow. She, I think, is in one of the most delicate positions of any of the characters, because the family have made her feel part of them and she is now quite relaxed in their midst and will say what she likes. But at the same time the life she has actually led is much closer to Clarkson’s, and although her husband and father were rather grand doctors, nevertheless they spent their time healing and dealing with patients. Like Clarkson. So she can talk to him without having to explain, because he understands the things she’s saying. From which you may infer we’re getting set to put her in a predicament. All the way through a show, you’re trying to put the characters into predicaments that need to be resolved.
43 Edith is very torn. In some ways she is pleased and in other ways she just doesn’t quite know what can come of it.
44 That was my grandmother.
45 Mary is slightly mocking him, because in a sense he is going along with Gregson’s plan. ‘Don’t dislike him before you know him’: that assumption of dislike because this person is not their type is something I used to come up against. Not from my mother, who was fairly wild, but my father would just assume that so-and-so was not his sort of person and that was that. The trouble was, sometimes they were his type of person if he would only open his eyes. He had to be led to it gently.
46 The awareness that your presence makes people slightly uncomfortable can be rather sobering.
47 If you weren’t in a pelting hurry, and particularly for riding over an estate, using traps continued well into the motor age. My great-great-aunt, Lady Sydenham, whom I’ve talked about before, had a Daimler for long journeys and for going up and down to London, but a trap to meet the train in Lamberhurst and to drive her into the town for shopping or to a neighbour’s for lunch. She thought she saw more of the countryside and benefited from the air. In a way it was quite modern – petrol saving was part of it – but also the pace of life suited horse-drawn travel. For Aunt Phyllis, her guests were met off the train by a trap until her death in 1952.
48 These slight friendships are really part of the fabric of the show.
49 If you have lovers in a show, every now and then you want to show them enjoying a romantic moment. Which was the purpose of this scene.
50 I was sorry this had to go because the visit gave us a chance to explore this sort of petty rivalry, which, I am sure, was very much part of that way of life, and very undermining when it happened.
51 I was pleased we were allowed the pony laden with the stag, which might have been a victim of television’s sometimes rather prim and townie attitudes. The truth is, when you are stalking you are taking out stags and they have to be brought down from the hill. That’s why ponies go up there with you. To show all of that but not the stag coming down would have been false and overprotective. I don’t think we had any backlash at all, actually, but that was the reason for doing it visually and truthfully.
52 There were many unhappy marriages that stuck it out during the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras, but, as I have said, after the war a lot of them began to come unstuck because society was loosening up. It was the Jazz Age, wild and free, and the whole business of living with someone you detested for the look of the thing was increasingly seen as ridiculous. But one of the absolute milestones in this development was the 1921 divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, as we discuss in several episodes. It really changed things, paving the way for many others; from then on divorce among the upper classes became more and more common.
53 This was a lovely scene, the simple picnic. I’ve talked before of my experience as a boy when I thought I was going on a picnic in a T-shirt and jeans and we ended up in a Gothic pavilion on the edge of a canal, waited on by servants. We are making a similar joke here. They talk about the Duneagle picnic, which turns out to be a stately and formal affair. They had a certain amount of trouble with midges – midges being the bane of the glens – but we managed to lose them in the edit.
54 I made a point of dropping the ‘i’ of venison, because ‘venson’ is the pronunciation I grew up with. If you spell it correctly, you always risk the wrong sound.
55 We continue to lay the circumstances of O’Brien’s subsequent departure, revealed the following year, which is the purpose of this plot.
56 I chose Bombay because my own great-great-uncle, Sir George Sydenham Clarke, later Lord Sydenham, was made Governor of Bombay and he was there to welcome the King and Queen for the great Delhi Durbar of 1911, the only time that an Emperor and Em
press of India visited the country. It was such a high point in Uncle George’s career that he had ambitions of the Vice-Regal Crown, which did not come to pass. Let us hope he was satisfied with his peerage and his subsequent life at Lamberhurst Priory in Kent. Anyway, that’s why I decided to send Shrimpie to Bombay and, in his case, as a much grander chap than Uncle George, it probably would have been seen as a test run for the Vice-Regalty. But they will mess everything up by getting divorced.
57 All this came from our historical advisor Alastair Bruce, who is a very keen stalker. I wrote outline dialogue and he just filled it in.
58 As I’ve repeatedly said, servants always knew more about the family than the other way round, because they were often privy to private conversations, whereas the family never overheard their servants talking informally.
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