Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1 (55 page)

The housekeeper and the butler usually ate with the rest of the servants, but in some houses, though not at Downton, together with the valet and the ladies' maid, they would leave after the main course and go to the housekeeper's room to eat their pudding separately. We thought of doing this, but on reflection it felt like a bridge too far. Even so, what I hope we still get is that sense of a complicated pecking order: the butler, the cook, the housekeeper, the ladies' maids and the valets, would comprise what was known as the Upper Ten. Why they were called the Upper Ten and the rest were called the Lower Five nobody knows, because there were usually far more than five of the maids and footmen and so on, and there were often fewer than ten of the seniors, but anyway that's how it was. And whatever the technical rank of the rest, people deferred to the butler.

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Violet would never be rude to Mrs Crawley in an obvious way. If you said why were you so rude to her, she'd say ‘Rude? I wasn't rude', because it is part of her self-image that she always behaves perfectly. Here, I think she is simply sending out a clear message that just because the law has placed them in this, to her rather invidious, position, it doesn't mean they're all going to cosy down by the nursery fire. Violet is quite sure this is never going to happen and after this exchange, so are we.

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It is a truism that the upper classes never talk about money, but like many truisms it is not really true, or at least it is misleading. The British aristocracy is, and always has been, aware that their way of life and their presentation generally depends on sufficient funds being available. This has led them into curious marriages and business arrangements, many to be later regretted, times without number. As I have observed elsewhere, they may never talk about it, but they never think about anything else.

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Before the great changes of the 1870s and 1880s, local health, schooling and everything else was run by the families of the great estates. The daughters of the house and the daughters of the agent and the daughters of the vicar would all go down and teach geography and letters and numbers and religious instruction. It was a bit haphazard but not entirely inefficient and, rather depressingly, the percentage per capita of literacy was if anything higher at the turn of the century than it is now. The syllabus was not wide. The emphasis was on providing the children with the necessary equipment to earn their living. They had to be literate, they had to be numerate, and they needed good handwriting, another detail that is lost to this generation. But I didn't really want a school, which would be difficult to manage in terms of the narrative strands for young pupils, whereas a hospital seemed to me to be a good way of creating a dynamic within the village so that we would not be solely dependent on the activity in the house. It would also provide the chance of some rebellion for Isobel who, with her medical training, would be able take a superior position to the Crawleys. I always feel a little sorry for Richard Clarkson, the doctor, so wonderfully played by David Robb, because the stories continually depend on his misdiagnosing everything.

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Matthew's career is a secondary strand in the series because I don't think we're terribly interested in it. But it was important to contrast the American and middle-class work ethic with the aristocratic assumption that unless you are going to have a career as a diplomat or in Parliament, you should stay at home and manage the rent roll. Matthew wants to work and this allows Cora, as an American, to sympathise with him, while Robert is bewildered. It's not because Robert is lazy. He just doesn't understand why working on the estate and overseeing it isn't enough, while Matthew doesn't want to become dependent on his rich and grand relation. He wants some money in his trousers that he's earned himself. It is a typical
Downton
plot, in that one hopefully sympathises, to a degree, with both sides.

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Some of this was cut, but I think it's interesting for the audience to see what they missed. Here we have Matthew talking about bicycling to the station which is quite unnecessary as we see him do it. When you're writing something you often forget that it's going to be told visually, and so there are things that don't need to be said.

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‘… a sense of pride and dignity, that reflects the pride and dignity of the family he serves'. I think we've forgotten this side of being a servant because the PR for service, as a job, was not good for the generation who grew up after the Second World War. They saw it as a servile career and an improper one, doing things that people ought to do for themselves. But with any kind of labour, it is necessary for an employee to feel that there is some honour in what they're doing and for the employer to be aware of this. At least if you want the workers to be happy. That was true of the great households. In those days, to work in these palaces was something to be proud of, you were at the top of the tree in that career, someone to be reckoned with. If you went into the pub and you were working at Blenheim, you were something. You were not, after all, working at the Rectory.

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I was sorry they cut the reference to Isobel's father and brother, although it wasn't a surprise when they did. The Front Office for any film or television production can get a bit nervous when characters talk about people who aren't then represented in the drama as they tend to think it muddles the audience. But I disagree. I believe it is this sort of casual detail that creates a sense of the world beyond.

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I was very keen that Isobel should not simply be a great lady rolling bandages, but instead someone with real medical knowledge. So in her very first episode we have the plot of John Drake. The name is in fact lifted from the father of one of my son's school friends. The wretched contents of our address book have had to endure watching television on Sunday night and finding their own names jumping out of the screen at them.

I was interested by the dropsy plot, because dropsy sounds like a nineteenth-century disease when it isn't, in fact, but I enjoyed all the medical stuff. I have a friend, Alasdair Emslie, who is a doctor and I would write to him, explaining that I needed an illness where, say, someone is perfectly all right on Tuesday, dying on Wednesday and on Thursday they're playing cricket. He then replies that this could happen in a case of myeloencephalitis, or whatever, and that in fact this particular disease has a six-hour span. I would write it and send the script to him and he would reply that, no, she would never say he was too cold and she'd have to use a stick to apply the liniment and not a fork. I'd then correct the details and hand it in.

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Matthew has a resistance to a level of luxury which he suspects is unmanly. He has someone washing his smalls and helping him into his coat and he feels it must be wrong. But we (I hope) don't quite agree because we know this is someone's work. And so, just as we thought that Robert was in the wrong in objecting to Matthew wanting a career, so now we think Matthew is slightly in the wrong. Why should he deprive Molesley of his living? Part of this way of life means being a creator of jobs, a local employer. Once again, in the
Downton
way, at a certain point you're slightly on the side of one character but when you hear the other argument you could change sides.

Molesley in the hands of Kevin Doyle became wonderfully melancholic and of course I started to write for that because this is what happens when people develop a character. The story here should make the audience aware that when people work for you, you mustn't take away their dignity, whatever it is they're doing. For me, that is the mistake that Matthew is making, which would – and does eventually – horrify him.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.