Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1 (52 page)

The crowd starts to jostle. There are shouts and jeers. Branson approaches Sybil, who is bubbling with enthusiasm.

BRANSON: Oh, no. Oh, please God, no!
He takes her up in his arms, as tenderly as a father with his child.

Cover photograph by Nick Briggs

TEXT © BY JULIAN FELLOWES
2012.

THE AUTHOR ASSERTS HIS MORAL RIGHT TO BE IDENTIFIED AS THE AUTHOR OF THIS WORK.

EPISODE 4: WRITTEN BY JULIAN FELLOWES AND SHELAGH STEPHENSON.

EPISODE 6: WRITTEN BY JULIAN FELLOWES AND TINA PEPLER.

A CARNIVAL FILMS/MASTERPIECE CO-PRODUCTION.

DOWNTON ABBEY SERIES 1, 2, AND 3 AND ALL SCRIPTS.
Copyright © 2009 to 2012 by Carnival Film & Television Limited.
Downton Abbey
® and the
Downton Abbey
device are trademarks of Carnival Film & Television Limited. Carnival logo © 2005 by Carnival Film & Television Limited. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-223831-3

EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062238320

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*
I was keen on Highclere to play Downton Abbey from the start, because it is an extraordinary expression of aristocratic confidence, a loud statement of the value of aristocracy. The house was built, or rather, adapted, in the 1830s, at the very beginning of Queen Victoria's reign, by Sir Charles Barry who was working on the Houses of Parliament at the time. Knowing as we did that the series, if it was going to run at all, would trace the decline of this particular class there seemed to be a nice irony in choosing a house that was so confident of their worth and value, and you get that from the first moment you arrive, when you enter the great atrium hall to find the coats of arms of every bride reaching all the way up to the ceiling. Somehow that seemed right, as a comment on Robert's melancholy appreciation that these will prove to be the last days of summer for his kind. These houses were deliberately designed to look monumental, and when you enter any of them, even Blenheim, you will find they are not quite as big as they look from outside, although they are big enough, Lord knows. But Highclere has the added advantage of a very straightforward plan. On the left of the entrance is the small library, followed by the large library, the painted room, the drawing room, the smoking room which we don't use, the staircase, the door to the kitchens, and the circuit is complete with the dining room. Once they've been shown that plan, it becomes a very easy one for the audience to follow. It's the same with the bedrooms; there's a square gallery running round the hall and the bedrooms are off it. So the audience never has to wonder how they got to the library or where precisely is the drawing room. It's all absolutely clear, and that's a big advantage in filming. Basically, these are the rooms we use to show how the Crawleys live, and these are the rooms we film in.

†
Daisy, the scullery maid, is up before anyone. Her first job of the day is to wake the other servants.

*
We built the kitchens and the attics at Ealing Studios because in all of these houses those are the bits that are completely changed, either to be used for other, more modern purposes, or so run down that you'd have to rebuild them anyway. The advantage is that having standing sets at Ealing gives us flexibility. Highclere has other activities going on and we have to fit round those so we have the option of going to Ealing. We've also built Robert's dressing room there, and Mary's bedroom – which is sometimes redecorated to be someone else's. The doors of these rooms are copied from the bedroom doors at Highclere, as well as the windows and, through the glass, we see great panoramic cycloramas of the park. The point of all this brilliant craftsmanship is that we're never completely stuck for something to do.

†
One of Daisy's jobs is to creep into the bedrooms – the only time she ever went into the upstairs rooms – and build the fires. This was done for me just once in my life, and I cannot tell you the sense of luxury it conveys. The maid wore gloves, thick felt gloves, so you wouldn't hear as she put the fire together. Everything was done very quietly and then lit, so that when you woke up there was the fire already burning in the grate.

*
The challenge at the beginning of any series is to give enough information to follow the whole show but to convey it without it feeling indigestible. Brian Percival was the director of the first episode, the ninety-minute one, and is now the father director of the series; he usually does the first block and the last block, and has become the authority for other directors to refer to, in terms of the
Downton
style. He came up with an extraordinary shot to introduce the house and the life being lived in it. Daisy is first seen in the Ealing set climbing the kitchen staircase, but the top of these stairs is a replica of the real one at Highclere, so she is then picked up coming out through the glass screen at Highclere and is taken round the hall and through the libraries, until we lose Daisy and pick up Thomas so he can conduct us out of the library, past the drawing room door, through the hall again, past the staircase and into the dining room. In a single shot the audience has the whole layout of the ground floor that we're going to use, the way the servants work within it, where they come in and go out, as well as all the different tasks that are being undertaken; Brian shows us how there is a pecking order of command, from top to bottom. And all this information has been given in three minutes. A marvellous piece of work.

*
At the beginning we wanted the audience to understand that this was a show essentially about two groups of people living in one house, but with different functions within it, and the first few scenes are about that. They define the chain of command so that when the junior footman says ‘I'm not late, am I?' and the senior footman replies ‘You're late when I say you're late', we immediately know which one is the more powerful in the set-up.

†
This was the moment when electricity was gradually spreading through England. Reasonably sophisticated people could deal with it, but it was still sufficiently new that there were people (in this case Daisy) who were alarmed. The point was that few really spotted its significance. Even Robert shows later he couldn't see the point of having it in the kitchens. Of course, by the time the second series starts, in 1916, things have moved on and the whole house has been electrified.

*
I was rather sorry when this was cut because when Mrs Hughes says, ‘It's all right, Thomas. I'm not countermanding Mr Carson's orders', what she means is that she understands Thomas is not under her direct control, so again the audience would have been given the sense that there is a very complicated precedence among these people. In fact, the female staff, apart from the kitchen workers, were under the housekeeper, the male staff answered to the butler, and the kitchen was controlled by the cook. It's not therefore just a simple case of there being the family and the servants. Not by any means.

*
Thomas: ‘And they're off.' What we are doing here is giving a sense of an unbreakable routine, a life lived by bells, bells that kick off the upstairs life, bells that summon them to various tasks, and the servants have to try and get their breakfast down before the bells start to ring. They know that once the working day begins, it doesn't end until everyone goes to bed.

*
Ironing newspapers is a cliché in a way because everyone knows it was done; but on the other hand a lot of people still think they were ironed to make them flat, as opposed to being ironed so that the ink would dry. It is sometimes quite fun to correct these common misapprehensions.

*
The challenge of an opening episode, as I keep saying, is to give the audience enough information so that they can follow the show. The reason I chose the sinking of the
Titanic
to begin with, was because the
Titanic
is an iconic disaster. There are very few people who've never heard of the
Titanic
and most of us have a fairly accurate idea of when it took place, which is just before the First World War. By sinking two off-screen characters on the
Titanic
it is a shorthand way of saying we are in England and it is just before the First World War. These characters are not living in Queen Victoria's reign, but during the aftermath of the long Edwardian summer, in that seemingly placid period just before the war would shake everything up. The audience knows all this because the script contains one word,
Titanic
, or indeed from the moment when Robert opens the newspaper and they see those familiar four funnels. You don't have to spend lots of time explaining. This one incident tells them what they need to know. As it happens, I was later asked to write the mini-series of
Titanic
, but, in case anyone is interested, that was a complete coincidence.

*
The daughters are deliberately defined quite differently from the start. Mary is fairly hard, a bit snobbish and even selfish, but not essentially a bad person. She is reasonably decent inside and she is prepared to accept the new; she is not digging in her heels. Edith is not an originator and so she just goes along with what is happening. If she had lived in the fifteenth century she'd have covered her hair and spent half the day on her knees. While the youngest, Sybil, is essentially a rebel. She doesn't accept limitations, immediately identifies with new causes, including women's rights, and she is enthused by the sense of change in the air. The characters were cast accordingly and I think all three have delivered. The great thing about defining the sisters means that you get a different mood out of all of them. Otherwise there is a danger that you have something generic called ‘the daughters' and not much more. You have to make it clear from the start that they are going to have contrasting responses to everything and, in this case, the actresses built on that.