Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1

by Julian Fellowes

  * The important element of this exchange is for the audience to be aware that Bates was a drunk and a nasty drunk at that. In other words, he behaved very badly to his wife. Because I don’t think you can understand his character without that knowledge. We already know he used to be a drunk because he’s told Carson and Mrs Hughes. But we don’t know that he was bitter and cruel. Consequently Bates blames himself for what his wife has become, and the audience needs to know that, to make this plot work.

  * Butlers and footmen often had an informal cotton coat to wear when they came downstairs or into the servants’ territory. They would take off their morning coat or livery, to protect them from being marked, but they would have a coat to change into so that they would be respectably dressed. This was called a change coat.

  * Here we have another mind-changing Downton moment, where, just when O’Brien is at her nastiest, exacting this horrible revenge on the luckless Cora, she is suddenly gripped by the horror of what she has done and she tries to stop it, but she is too late. Hopefully, this makes the audience feel slightly reluctant to condemn her absolutely, while still being on Cora’s side over the unprovoked malice of the deed.

  * I find this scene between Bates and Robert moving, another illustration of the contrast in the relationship between master and servant when they are in public and when they’re in private. Because they are alone together, Robert’s guard is down and he does not hide that he is weeping for his dead son. It is a key moment between them, and a reminder of how little you could hide from a valet or a lady’s maid. When Robert says, ‘I don’t mean to embarrass you,’ and Bates replies ‘I’m not embarrassed,’ the moment was probably inspired by my late mother who used to say that embarrassment is the only unproductive emotion, which I agree with. Because of her, I strongly reject embarrassment and here Bates’s statement of support, by also rejecting embarrassment, is important. It is a rare opportunity for him to show his affection for Robert.

  * I confess I like Thomas. He knows he’s about to be sacked, he knows that everyone dislikes him, that they’d all be glad to see the back of him, and so like someone about to fall he jumps first. Of course he is a loner, with little interest in the opinions of others, but as I’ve said before, being gay at that time was very difficult, so he has some excuse for feeling alien and isolated. And what I like is that he doesn’t sit about. Whether he’s a deserter or a thief, he is always precipitating the next change in his life, which, for me, is essentially sympathetic. He is not passive and I suppose the people I do not admire are the ones who let life happen to them, as opposed to taking the wheel. Thomas always takes the wheel.

  * The wording of this telegram comes from a story in my own family. My dear father was born in July 1912, thus in the summer of 1914 he was two. For some reason he and his parents were staying with his grandmother that August at her home in Hampshire. There was a garden party at a house nearby called Hurstbourne Park, which was lived in by the Countess of Portsmouth, to which the whole Fellowes family was invited. All Pa’s life he could clearly remember standing with his nurse at the heart of the great, chattering throng when a man walked out of the long windows of the drawing room on to the terrace and asked for silence. There was a hush and he said in a loud voice: ‘I very much regret to announce that we are at war with Germany.’ And that was Daddy’s first memory. I asked him why he thought it had remained so vivid and he replied that he could only suppose the announcement created such a tense vibration of emotions through all the people present, all the adults, all the servants, everyone, that even a childish brain could realise something extraordinary was happening. I nearly put a little boy into the scene to have him being Pa looking up at the speaker, but then I thought it was too private a joke. There was another irony in the tale. My twenty-nine-year-old grandfather was there too, with his young wife. He would be dead in less than a year.