Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1

by Julian Fellowes

  * With these characters, you can often only suggest their back story because you haven’t got time to do more, and I thought that if Violet, who always looks as if she’s in control of everything, had endured a nightmare mother-in-law, there would be a suggestion that she might understand what it is not to be behind the wheel; to have to deal with someone when she couldn’t get them out of the way. In fact, we have one or two other references to this demonic, previous Lady Grantham who drove the young Violet mad.

  † This, the local roots of many servants, was a significant part of life on a country estate as opposed to working in a London house. In the capital there was a tremendous turnover in this job and in fact, surprisingly, in the 1880s, the average time for a London footman to stay in a house was eighteen months. This can partly be explained by the fact that you couldn’t often get promotion within the same house. As a rule, you had to go somewhere else to move up. But the real difference, when it came to the country house, was that many of the servants would have been born in the area, which meant that they and their employers had a certain shared history. With the exchange between Molesley and Violet, we are suggesting an easiness, where everyone knows and accepts the rules.

  * For this story, I wanted a condition where there was a new treatment which a local doctor would probably resist, whereas Isobel has come from a big city, where medicine is inevitably slightly more up to the minute. Manchester wouldn’t be ahead of London, but it certainly would be ahead of Downton, and so you have Clarkson resisting the injection of adrenaline which had only started to be the accepted treatment for dropsy quite a short time before this.

  * One of the reasons for this scene is that I’m absolutely convinced this way of life, like any way of life for that matter, had its own rules, and in order for it to be bearable people had to accept those rules and live by them. Cora, as an American and to an extent an outsider, doesn’t always observe the rules.

  * What I was trying to do here was to introduce the notion that most people, even among the upper classes and to an accelerating degree, did have to earn their living. In a lot of historical fiction it’s as if everyone was the eldest son but any great family had a lot of members who were not left great fortunes. There were whole areas of gainful employment that were acceptable to junior members of such a family, the church, the army, the navy, and, to a certain extent, the law. One of the things about the Indian army was that it paid properly, unlike the Grenadiers, or other smart regiments, which required a private income. When the money started to dry up with the agricultural depression of the 1880s, it was bad news for those dependent on handouts. Of course looking at it now, retrospectively, we can see the modern world in a way beginning in the 1880s, when things were still done in the old way but financial realities were beginning to bite.

  Deliberately I have made Mary quite snobbish. I felt it would be unrealistic and even sentimental to have the entire family devoid of any social awareness and so what I hope we’ve achieved is different manifestations of it. Robert is not a snob but he doesn’t challenge the structure of the world in which he lives; Sybil, on the other hand, consciously rejects all of its values. Edith does what she is told and Mary has that kind of non-extreme snobbery which means she could enjoy meeting many different types but she doesn’t question her own social superiority. In this scene, you get the relative positions of the girls.

  * I wanted the many watching who were not hunting people to understand the ordinariness of the culture of country sports at this time. To our forebears in 1912, farming and shooting and hunting and estate management were all manifestations of a way of life where there were many different roles but a single morality. I didn’t want to stumble into the great argument, but it was important to me to get this across. I remember there was some pressure to give dialogue to a character to justify hunting, and for someone else to attack it. But at this time, hunting, and everything connected to it, was seen as ordinary and I do feel that one of the things you have to watch in period writing is to put modern prejudices into period situations.

  † One of the servants’ jobs, and particularly the housekeeper’s, was this endless rotation of sheets and china and sets of this and that, to make sure that everything was used and everything was looked after. The family, in that, as in so many things, was living on a pie crust in a state of blissful ignorance while all the necessary work was being done largely without their knowledge. I think that is a key part of this world.

  * The new dances were the beginning of a kind of drip, drip, drip of the modern world creeping into these men’s and women’s consciousness. Because in a way music is one of the things that has changed our society more than almost anything else. Today, popular music has the power to alter our behaviour completely, and it began then.

  * Unrequited love is quite a big theme of this show. Lots of the characters are in love with the wrong people, not just among the family, but also with the servants, as I think unrequited love is often a product of the work situation. That is, when you mix up a lot of men and women in close physical proximity, and you keep them working together day after day, you will inevitably have emotional entanglements. In an ordinary courtship, in the outside world, then unrequited love is less inevitable. The young man comes to call with an invitation to dinner, and if the young lady doesn’t want to go then that’s the end of that. But when, like at Downton (or any factory or office block), you have people being brought together constantly, whether or not they would rather avoid the encounters, then I’m afraid unrequited love is often a by-product. In this instance we’re talking about Daisy being in love with Thomas the footman who of course is gay. She is not aware of this, and it is worth remembering that although, here, most of the older household suspect he is, in those days it wouldn’t be anything like common knowledge.

  † Matthew doesn’t at all blame Mary for resenting him. Here it is her own grandmother, Violet, who wishes Mary would shut up and get on and marry him. In other words, the situation obliges almost everyone to behave in the opposite way to their natural instincts.

  * In a way O’Brien’s struggle is still with us. Is it easier to deal with people who are born great than with people who have made themselves great. Because when people make themselves great then in a way they are an indictment of everyone else who has not become great. If it’s possible then why haven’t you done it? Whereas if you live in a world where people’s greatness is determined by birth, then it’s not your fault that you haven’t done anything to bring it about. That was just the way the cookie crumbled. Oddly, really, even today, you will find a curious hostility to self-made money that doesn’t exist towards inherited fortunes. Morally of course it ought to be quite the reverse but it isn’t, and there’s no doubt that, particularly in this country, success can provoke tremendous fury for no real reason.

  * Personally, I do believe that this life is only possible to live in a positive and fulfilling way if you believe in it. The harshest fate, then or now, is to inherit a great name, a great fortune and a great house, when you have no desire to live that life. It is just a smothering weight around your neck and I have seen men almost broken by it.

  * The point of Robert’s response here was really was to make it clear that we are in the last days of when it was true. And it was going to be very hard for that generation of aristocrats that they would outgrow and outlive their own power.

  * What I wanted was a very traumatic operation, performed on a man who is literally hovering between life and death, which would produce an immediate response so that, having required a very frightening decision to go through with it, there would be an instant and clear improvement. The treatment for dropsy, which is very, very dramatic in the terrifying mechanics of draining off the lungs, does have this effect. The colour at once floods back into the face. Here, Mrs Drake has to make this terrible decision with Violet deeply disapproving, but her bravery and courage are rewarded.

  * Matthew’s journey in this show, and it is quite a long one,
is to educate Robert in the ways of the modern world, and help him to see that benevolence is not enough, that business management and common sense must also be part of it. Here, Matthew starts him off by helping him to see the point of restoring the cottages.

  * This scene was filmed, but it was cut in the edit. However, it may seem familiar and that is because it was revived and re-shot the following year, for Episode Seven in the second series. The feeling was that, while it played no part in any specific narrative (and so could easily be moved), it was too important for the back story of Carson’s love for Mary not to be included somewhere.

  * Evelyn Napier is a character I like; he pops up in two or three episodes, mainly being decent and good, but never showy. Brendan Patricks plays him with diffidence and skill, and I find him very beguiling. I am not sure we’ve seen the last of him, actually.

  * One of the most important aspects of this period was the shifting view of women’s roles. They were on the edge of deep and profound change, which would become apparent almost as soon as the war began. Like any popular movement, the whole question of women’s rights didn’t break the surface of the water until there was already a good deal of support. Until then, the number of career openings for women was very small; for working class women it was service or work in the factories, for middle class women there was almost nothing beyond being a governess and for upper class women there wasn’t even that. I did feel we needed the issue to be represented within the house. The idea that everyone was happy to be in service, and content with the pecking order, was gradually being recognised as false, but of course, as with everything, there were plenty who would resist the new ideas. Here, some of the servants are quite sympathetic to Gwen’s ambitions, others feel affronted that in a way it’s as if she’s saying they’re not good enough.

  * This is one of our first plots in which poor Edith is bound to fail. Because Mary is moving on she feels she might have a chance with Matthew, and like many of Edith’s ideas, it’s perfectly reasonable. For him to marry the second daughter rather than the elder would have solved the situation just as well, the bloodlines would have both been served and everyone would have been content. But we have established a pattern whereby, for Edith, it is usually unlikely to work out. I’m afraid I know people like that.

  * Mrs Hughes is essentially a reasonable woman, but even she feels that this is overstepping the mark. Gwen is challenging her authority, which she has not deserved.

  * Gwen’s situation here is, and should be, a complicated one. By her saying ‘I want more than this’, she is, in a way, indicting the others for not wanting more. But why should they want more? Are they wrong to be content in their work? Are they in the right or is she? This makes the fight between Gwen and Carson a Downton’esque one because both sides are perfectly reasonable. Of course Anna and Bates are essentially on Gwen’s side.

  * Bates’s leg story actually comes out of one of my activities when I was an actor. I used to eke out my living by giving lectures on domestic history – ‘Anne Boleyn, Witch or Victim’, ‘The Intrigues of Marie Antoinette’, that sort of thing – and I would present these talks in places like Palm Beach or Naples, Florida, or the Colony Club in New York. One of them concerned the private life of Lord Byron. I have always been interested in Keats’s theory of ‘negative capability’ and his belief that the true artist is a vessel that is filled by their own creative talent, that, in other words, they’re not terribly interesting as people, and certainly you often find that it is the lesser artist, the movie stars rather than the great classical actors, the writers of thrillers, the popular singers, who are actually more rewarding as characters. As an illustration of this, Byron was not nearly as great a poet as Keats but he lived an extraordinary life and I was haunted for years by the machines that his mother, Mrs Byron, had employed to cure his club foot and straighten his leg. They were instruments of torture, but Byron endured them because when you are different there seems to be a kind of imperative to conquer your difference and become the same as everyone else. The great moral triumph of being different, so brilliantly illustrated by the Paralympics, is to accept your difference which of course empowers you, but there is, I suspect, often a period that you have to go through when you’re trying to be the same before you can get to that. I didn’t want Bates to be too much of a saint on a monument. He’s settling in, he likes Anna more and more and understandably he wants to get rid of his limp. After all, we know it is recent, a war wound that flared up a few years earlier, and he wants to go back to normal. He is also brave enough to subject himself to considerable pain in his efforts.

  * We had to find a very good-looking actor to play the Turk as we needed the audience to believe that Mary would be sufficiently overcome to abandon her principles. The problem with good looks, when they are important to a narrative, is that men and women seldom agree about what constitutes a good-looking member of their own sex. In this instance we felt it was more important that women should find Pamuk attractive and I remember settling that beforehand with Jill Trevellick, our casting agent, who recommended Theo James, and happily she was right. Most women did think him extremely good-looking. If men find him handsome, too, then so much the better.

  * Inevitably, with this sequence, we had a few complaints about the wrong bridles and that sort of thing. Apparently no one would have hunted on a skewbald in those days, but on the whole, I was pleased with the hunt. The one thing I was very keen on was that we should not show hunting as it is usually depicted in films, where the horses fly across green meadows in sunny, high summer with the trees heavy with leaf. They even got it wrong in Tom Jones, which is a wonderful film. So, here we made quite a point of shooting the scene early in the schedule, when the trees were bare and while we were in fact still in the hunting season.

  † I was particularly impressed with Michelle Dockery’s mastery of the art of riding side-saddle. She has a little help from a (marvellous) double in a few of the shots, but nevertheless what she did achieve in a comparatively short time was extraordinary. She wanted to make it look good and she certainly did. Theo also served us well and he was just as keen to get the riding right.

  * I had to adjust all of Edith’s dialogue about the screen and the other details concerning the church’s interior once we had settled on which church we were actually going to use. I was sent the brochure and I had to rewrite the scene to fit that particular nave.

  * Thomas’s pass here is another beat in the ongoing homosexual narrative. For me, a key element which makes Thomas slightly sympathetic, at any rate to most of us, is the danger that was involved for anyone trying to live life then as a gay; you really were always in danger, every overture could end in ruin. Here we need him to fail, because he must be forced to show Mary’s bedroom to a stranger, or how else would Kemal be able to find it? But still it is a reminder of the injustice meted out to homosexuals at that time. You could try your luck with a maid and the worst thing that could happen would be for her to turn you down, but a gay pass could mean prison. A friend of mine overheard a group in a restaurant talking about this episode and a woman said: ‘Do you think people really did go to bed with the footman when they were staying in a house party?’ And one of the others replied, ‘Oh my dear, it was part of the job description.’ I loved that.

  † When it comes to Gwen’s goals, Sybil is extremely sympathetic, Edith doesn’t see the point and Mary couldn’t care less either way, which, for me, sums up the sisters very aptly.

  * This observation comes entirely from my own history. The dentist of my childhood had been my mother’s and because he had treated her and her sisters, there was absolutely no question that he would not treat us. Unfortunately, by then he was a crusty old man with thick horrible fingers and no grasp of any of the new methods, so everything he did was agony. In those days, the emphasis for the English was only on the health of one’s teeth. To mind whether they looked good was just vain silliness, and so we were all condemned to have teeth like old garde
ning tools.

  * This exchange between Kemal – ‘I don’t think our union would please your family … or mine’ – was to illustrate the arrogance and lack of imagination in this type of Englishwoman. Mary would assume that anyone would be absolutely thrilled by having her as a daughter-in-law. The idea that there was a rival culture which would see her as an unsuitable bride would be astonishing. Michelle does it well. Watch the shadow that crosses her face. In my experience, the English are curiously dense when it comes to recognising any kind of foreign rank. To them, it is better to be an English baronet than a French duke.

  In the edit, the Powers made a cut we all came to regret. After commenting that Mary ‘could still be a virgin for your husband’, which stayed in, Kemal was supposed to say: ‘A little imagination, a phial of blood hidden beneath the pillow, you wouldn’t be the first.’ But this was excised. Despite arguing fairly passionately, I could not convince them the lines were needed. I explained that, without them, it was anyone’s guess what Kemal was doing to Mary that would leave her virginity intact. But they were confident that no one would make any untoward connection. ‘Nobody will think that,’ they said. But everyone thought it. We had letters and calls of complaint, we had indignant Turkish viewers, and no wonder. However, one thing I did realise from this moment and that was the extent to which people were watching the show in detail; some of them would see every episode two, three, four times. All of which meant they assumed that Pamuk must have done something unspeakable which we won’t name here. We never came up against another cut that was quite as misleading, but it did mean that when there was a line that made all the difference to the sense of a scene I was a much tougher fighter thereafter.