Abbey Fever

I’m in love. Like a teenager. I hunger for the union of Mary and Matthew Crawley as if they were real people. Struck by Matthew’s translucent blue eyes and Mary’s compassionate free-thinking intelligence. Amused by the Countess of Grantham’s acerbic wit in response to the crises that sweep through Crawley Estate. I live in another world removed from my own.

What am I talking about? It can only be the three-part television mini-series Downton Abbey. Gareth Neame’s idea of an Edwardian television drama is given form and put into play by Julian Fellowes.

Fellowes was scriptwriter for The Young Victoria, Vanity Fair and Gosford Park films. He wrote Snobs, a novel depicting the social nuances of the upper class, and a second novel, Pitch Perfect, where the 1968 British debutante season was compared to the world of 2008. British aristocracy, and time, which changes manners and attitudes, obsessed him. This is nowhere more evident than in Downton Abbey.

Although Fellowes is a life peer and sits in the House of Lords, is Lord of the Manor of Tattershall in Lincolnshire, he is not a blueblood. His father was a diplomat. A child of privilege, he was educated at private schools. He married into royal stock but his own ancestors were servants at an estate which inspired his fictitious Abbey. Perhaps having a foot in both camps enabled him to present both masters and servants, aristocrats and the working class, in a sympathetic and comprehensive light.

The story follows the lives of Robert and Cora Crawley, their three enterprising daughters, and their servants, in the seat of Grantham during the reign of George V. From 1912 into the 1920s, it shows how the sinking of the Titanic, the First World War, the introduction of electricity, telephone and motor car, postwar disillusionment, Spanish flu and financial crises affect and change individual lives, even the social hierarchy. A Crawley daughter marries the Irish Catholic chauffeur. Women become aware of the value of work. Old-school thinking is forced to bend or break.

Finding a future male heir for Downton, and a suitable husband for daughter Mary, provide the story’s scaffold. Around this a plethora of sub-stories unfold: love affairs, deceit, exposure, revenge, ambition, loyalty, power play, lust, investment, teamwork, awakenings, illness and death. In other words, the series has all the ingredients of good drama!

As a backdrop, the flurry of meal and party preparation, the welcoming and farewelling of guests go on at frantic pace.

Short scenes are woven together. Time passing between series and episode moves the plot forward. Fellowes has an innate sense of what his viewers want. He gratifies them, endlessly, and sometimes surprises them.

Most of the show is credible. The fine acting “suspends our disbelief”. The main characters become people I think about in bed, as I would real people. I hope for the resolution of their problems. When the actors are interviewed, drop their roles and become themselves, I feel betrayed.

The actors themselves talk about their characters as people in their own right, with a separate existence. They say the play has become more than the sum of its parts, larger than themselves.

Besides acting, there is the pleasure of viewing history in small things—when measurements were taken for the correct position of tablemats, when masters gave presents to their servants on Boxing Day, when mortification and scandal accompanied affairs, when protocol was observed equally by both classes, when intimacy and openness existed between lord and valet, lady and maid despite the gap in class.

Care has been taken to make the set authentic. The 1919 Christmas tree decorations have been researched. The cast had to take dancing lessons for the house balls. War scenes with mud and genuine explosives took place in a Suffolk “battlefield” set up permanently for war filming.

Integral to acting, history and set is the script. The words are rendered with diction appropriate for the character—wise, witty, guarded, unguarded, poetical, intimate, sardonic, hurtful, gracious. Of Maggie Smith, Countess of Grantham, one commentator said: “She has a lovely way of delivering words, always spaced to perfection.” Her diction, her pauses, her carriage and her face give weight to her words.

Downton Abbey entered the Guinness Book of Records as the most critically acclaimed, well-received television show of all. Over one hundred countries broadcast it. The actress who plays Lady Mary was recognised on the street in New York. Awards for acting, writing, costumes, casting, hair-styling and music avalanched in.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Ruth Bloomfield wrote: “Expectation among the legions of fans of British costume drama Downton Abbey is running at fever pitch, with season three launched this weekend in the US.” There is now high demand among followers to buy or rent an English country castle.

Despite the accolades, emotion racing ahead of reason, Downton Abbey is fallible. Cogs in the machinery can occasionally be glimpsed. Our heroes are kept safe. And some dilemmas have predictable outcomes. Parts of the story line are facile, tacked on, such as when the assertive Isobel is duped in an instant by two “more powerful women” to get her out of the way.

But the most glaring inconsistency is Lord Grantham’s sudden and inexplicable affair with a maid. It is unjustified even with the knowledge of his faltering marriage. It is completely out of character with everything he is and stands for. A bad note. We have no sympathy for the woman. She is a stick figure whose character is not developed.

Another flaw is the overuse of sub-plots. Too many stories go on at once—though some viewers would argue this keeps up the pace.

Accepting all these flaws, what does it say about me? About the vast number of obsessed viewers? About the addictive nature of the series?

Perhaps it fills the hunger for what is missing in our lives. Perhaps it meets the need for an ordered stable existence, where people know what is expected according to their roles and are satisfied in carrying them out. Perhaps too it gets us away from the “What’s for dinner?” tedium of our lives. And it is easy to watch, like something viewed privately and comfortably through binoculars. Confessional.

Downton Abbey could justifiably be called a soap opera, albeit sophisticated. But it is more. What remains at the end of the second series is the deep-seated pleasure of having seen a tapestry of character and era, a presentation of old values before they are lost, the warmth and stability of a protected lifestyle, an affirmation of decency and ways in which two classes transcend their barriers.

I will find a new definition for “soap opera”, and join nine million other addicts in feeling grateful.