Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1 (58 page)

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Violet is not a fool. She is a good judge of character, and although she's quite waspish with him, she knows that Matthew will do what she wants because his own sense of honour will force him to. He will be far more scrupulous than an ordinary lawyer, who might skim it for the fees, without taking any trouble. Matthew must be quite, quite sure there is no doubt about his right to inherit. In that she has judged him correctly.

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This, and the later line about being a good sailor, were inventions of Shelagh Stephenson's, and they really make me laugh. I embellished it because I discovered that the swivel chair was invented by Thomas Jefferson.

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As I have said elsewhere, one of the great bones of contention in most of these houses was that the housekeepers had the key to the store cupboard, but the cooks did not. If they wanted something they had to ask the housekeeper and it would be given to them. Many cooks saw the custom as a lack of faith, as if they could not be trusted. The defence of it was that if more than one person had keys it would be impossible to keep a proper record of what was in store, of what was running out and what was not. The housekeeper did all the ordering and so that was the logic behind it, but it drove the cooks mad.

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I like the moment when William is trying to get up his nerve to ask Daisy to go to the fair and Thomas deliberately wrecks the plan. It is a demonstration of power. Thomas is a complicated character, both arrogant and defensive. His status is important to him, but his homosexuality makes him vulnerable. When you are a secret member of a group which is always being derided and condemned but you say nothing, it fosters a fury in you for keeping silent, until crushing others is almost the only revenge available. Thomas hates himself for not speaking up, and this is his revenge for that hatred. It's almost like being secretly Catholic or secretly Jewish or secretly anything where you let yourself collaborate in your own degradation by staying silent whenever it comes up.

I have always wondered if that was the reason why Lord Rosebery, Prime Minister at the end of the nineteenth century, despite being one of the greatest and richest noblemen of his day, introduced death duties. That it was a revenge against his own class for being forced to live a lie because he was gay. All his rank and possessions did not protect him from needing to be dishonest about who he really was, from the moment he woke to the hour he slept. As a result, he set
en train
the destruction of that very society that had forced him to live in a miasma of dishonesty. I think this anger at the world is what we see here in Thomas, but of course it is not what Bates sees.

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A butler's duties were many and varied. He would be directly responsible for maintaining the cellar, and he would oversee anything that happened in the dining room, but he would also supervise maintenance of the contents or the fabric, that is any kind of work in the house or on the house, unless there was a clerk of the works employed to manage exterior building. A workman employed in the house would be under the charge of the butler in most households. As testimony to this, I always like to see old Carson making his entries in books and doing all his paperwork.

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This is a speech I was rather proud of, and so I was saddened when it fell to the editor's axe. Still it's a good line, I'll use it somewhere else. In this story, just as Violet has judged Matthew correctly in thinking he will give her the right advice, Matthew judges Mary correctly in thinking that she will be quite sympathetic to the position he's been placed in.

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What is more interesting than the emotion of love? How it really is almost never based on any kind of logical thinking. Maybe, much later in life, some sensible considerations might play a part in deciding whether to commit your heart to another, but when you're young you simply select people you are physically attracted to, and then invest them with all sorts of qualities which they probably don't possess. Or, if they do, it is completely coincidental. Here we have a classic example of that.

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Mrs Hughes is the daughter of a Scottish tenant farmer which would be a pretty standard background for a servant then. She's shown talent in her job and she's progressed. One of the hardest aspects of being a senior female servant was that, as a general rule, the top jobs, cook, housekeeper, lady's maid, were only given to unmarried women. Interestingly, the cooks and the housekeepers were given ‘Mrs' as a courtesy title but ladies' maids were not. Quite why that distinction was made I could not tell you.

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I like these rules; I always enjoy the fact that the kitchen staff eat together and they don't eat in the servants' hall. They may talk to the others, they may come into the servants' hall for a chat, but they never eat there, any more than the outside staff would have come in for their dinner. And O'Brien is right. The chauffeur would have eaten separately.

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When we saw the rushes of this, Matthew didn't stand up when Violet came in. He remained sitting, despite the fact that, at that time, it would have been completely impossible for a man to have stayed in his chair when a woman entered a room. So we had to remount the scene and reshoot the moment. What interested me is that, for my generation, if Maggie Smith walked into the room I would have to stand up, never mind if it were the Countess of Grantham in 1913. There was a similar instance when Matthew approached Mary in the garden and didn't remove his hat or even touch it. These episodes, and others like them, have made me realise that the automatic manners of my youth have gone now. If I'd been asked, before
Downton
, whether most men would still stand if a woman came into a room, I would have said yes, but I wouldn't agree with that today.

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I think they were probably right to cut a chunk of this scene. The statement of Bates's love is so well expressed visually, which is not something you can always anticipate when you're writing something. Here, to see this man standing there with his tray, complete with a flower in its little vase, says more about his feelings for her than dialogue would.

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Robert realises that Mary and Matthew are alone in the library, and this is (I hope) the first moment where we understand that he hasn't let go of Violet's idea that they might marry. He instructs Carson: ‘No wait until they ring' – just in case something might be happening.

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The fact that this way of life will not go on for ever is a theme that trickles through the show. That said, some of the characters don't question it and that is Mrs Hughes's position. Human beings usually assume that the way they live now will see them out and there are periods of history where it's fairly true. What we're not prepared for is absolute change and yet it happens. I remember when I was about nineteen I was at a drinks party and a girlfriend and I were talking to an old lady. She noticed the brooch my companion was wearing and commented that she used to have one just like it, it was her favourite, she said, she loved it. When I asked what had happened to it, she told me it was lost. I was horrified. She stared at me as though I were mad. ‘But I lost everything,' she said. It turned out she had been a great lady at the Russian Court before the revolution, and she'd wound up in London after a spell of making hats in Paris. It stuck in my mind because I realised that the concept of total reversal was something I hadn't really addressed before then. I remember wondering how would I manage if I was suddenly stranded in Madrid with nothing. Perhaps I'd drive a taxi. That's what lots of them did.

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This scene is about the developing relationship between Carson and Matthew. The family may not all be happy about the situation, but in the last analysis Matthew has Crawley blood which makes his claims acceptable. But they are not acceptable to Carson who does not share the blood-based culture. In some countries, blood matters at every level of society. I am sure any Italian would recognise a blood link, however distant, but in England that tremendous importance of blood seems to be restricted to the upper and the upper middle class, and the working class, where there is a real sense of clan. You don't often see it among the middle classes where people move around a good deal and tend to lose touch with most relations more distant than a first cousin. This is not true of toffs. They often know their eighth cousins, co-descendents from some Elizabethan courtier. To the Crawleys, Matthew is family. But to Carson, he's an outsider who deserves to be seen off.

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I always want to remind the audience that Carson is like a ringmaster and his job is to keep the entire staff, in some cases potentially quite unruly people, to keep them all on the straight and narrow. The butler of a great house was a headmaster, a taskmaster, a king.

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This scene was originally written for Episode Five, but it was later deemed more appropriate to the narrative of Four.  It is an example of the ‘building blocks' element of constructing a screenplay, which is told by a sequence of separate scenes, each one a moment in the story.  By re-ordering them, even after they have been shot, the plot line or a character's development can be altered, and often is.

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Although this scene was cut, I love the dialogue, when Anna says: ‘I hate being ill; my mother used to look down on ill people. She used to say “they're always ill” as if it were their fault.' And then Thomas replies: ‘My mother worshipped disease – if we ever wanted to get anything out of her we had to start by pretending to be ill.' In actual fact, Anna's mother is based on my own mother who always thought ill people were frightful time-wasters. She used to say: ‘Well do ring me up when you're well again', and then put down the telephone, and I'm afraid I'm rather like her. On the other hand, Thomas's mother is based on Emma's mother. For my mother-in-law, at the top of the moral high ground is a little hillock and on that hillock are the ill people. Poor Emma has to deal with these colliding philosophies.

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Of course Isobel has overcomplicated it and, for me, that is often the problem with so-called experts. The moment anyone refers to an ‘expert opinion', I always reach for my gun. You just know that too many ‘experts' will miss the essentials of the case.

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Anna sneezes here, because originally the scene was much earlier in the episode, so she had still not gone to bed with her cold. Again an example of how the rhythm of a piece sometimes demands that building blocks be moved around.

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I wanted to remind the public that even though women's clothes were beginning to loosen up a bit – a harbinger of the First World War fashions of the shorter skirt and so on – nevertheless they were still wearing corsets and having the laces tightened by their maids, every day of their lives, young and old alike.

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Restoring the cottages is the beginning of another
Downton
theme. We shall see that Matthew is essentially a businessman, he thinks the estate has to be managed properly and he would argue that it is not to anyone's advantage to run it badly. He is not at all opposed to Robert's philosophy when it comes to the estate's tenants, i.e. that he, Lord Grantham, is responsible for their welfare, but Matthew would say that it would help them more to make the place efficient. Robert can't see that. He thinks Matthew is too money-conscious, and that striving for financial efficiency is parsimonious and
bourgeois
. These two philosophies will eventually collide, but they don't collide yet.

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Mary is starting to like Matthew but at the same time she resents this unarguable fact. Her father has always wanted a son. He's put a good face on it, but that is what he longed for and now the heir has arrived. He might have been awful, but he's very nice, a personable, pleasant, young man and, without really noticing, Robert is turning Matthew into his son, downgrading Mary in the process. It is bad enough for Mary that the law gives her no value but for her father to collaborate in it, is very hard to bear. And Robert would never consider that he was hurting Mary in his adoption of Matthew, because he is incapable of challenging the moral precepts of the world into which he was born.

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Most people, at some time in their lives, have to take stock of how much they have changed. They have to accept that they do not want the things they used to want, or enjoy the things they used to enjoy, and there is nothing wrong with this. For me, one of the saddest aspects of the sixties generation is that they often won't acknowledge that their taste, whether in politics, clothes or music, has not only evolved, but
should
have evolved. I like Joe and I hope the audience does because, in a story about whether or not Mrs Hughes is going to marry, we needed her choice to be difficult. Here, she has been offered a healthy life with a nice man and if she is going to refuse him, then she'll need a good reason. I thought the actor, Bill Fellows, understood that and played it very well.

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We did film this scene but something went slightly wrong with the way it was shot, and it ended up looking incredibly sinister, like something out of
The Woman in Black
. So it was cut.

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The purpose of this moment with Daisy was to make it clear that Pamuk isn't going to go away, to remind the audience of the scandal so that they will know the scandalous death of the Turkish visitor will be hovering in the background for some time yet.