Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1 (62 page)

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I went onto the Internet to learn about the first cataract operations, and I discovered that they started years earlier than I'd thought, going back, in Europe, to the eighteenth century. I hoped they had come in before 1914, but it was much earlier. Moorfields, the eye hospital, has been going since 1805. That said, it was fairly crude and you had to wait until the cataract had formed. Even in my time, I remember my grandmother having a cataract operation in about 1970 and they wouldn't perform it until the tissue had formed a sort of crust. Golly.

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In many ways, this decade, from 1910 to 1920, effected what would come to be seen as the change from the Old World into the New. Of course there had been earlier inventions, different forms of heating, more efficient kitchen ranges and so on, but not much had altered fundamentally in the way life was lived in these houses for two centuries at least. You could say gas lighting was a big modernisation, but the difference between a gas lamp and a candle is only really one of maintenance. They both involve flames that must be lit and, more importantly, safely extinguished. And anyway, you never had gas lighting for everything. You still took a candle to light you to bed and many places had no gas lighting upstairs. There were also paraffin or oil lamps but these were too dangerous to carry around, when lit. A common mistake in films and television is when we see an unlit paraffin lamp sitting on a table during the day, as we might have a lamp that is turned off in a modern sitting room. This never happened. Paraffin lamps were removed from the room, either at night or first thing in the morning, when the family was not there, and taken to a lamp room, where one of the footmen's duties was to clean and refill them. They would not then be brought back into the drawing room until it was time to light them. In this first series we have electricity in the main rooms on the ground floor, but not in the bedrooms, which changes in the second series. The table at the foot of the stairs with the candles for the family and guests to carry upstairs went on in some places until the Second World War, but in a lot of houses it was gone after the First.

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In this sort of narrative almost every scene has to play more than one role. They have to deliver beats in two, three or even four storylines. This is particularly true of a drawing-room scene where you have several members of the family. In those big groups, about four or five different strands will be served.

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This exchange was designed to define Sybil as a strong personality. She is not just a vaguely rebellious teenager, but a serious critic of the system who is trying to get things done. This characterisation seems right for a time of change when quite a lot of young people were showing they did not want to go on with things as they were. Jessica Brown Findlay made a good job of it, and her performance pays off even more in the second series, so here we are laying the ground for the woman she becomes later.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.