Downton Abbey
Jasper Rees
It began with the sinking of the Titanic all those series ago. However many holes Julian Fellowes has seen fit to build in to the design, his own ocean-going liner has valiantly refused to go down with all hands on deck. But by Christmas we will have seen the last of Lord Grantham and his household, until such time as they all get resurrected for a big-screen reunion, even the Dowager Countess Maggie. For some, the bereavement will be too much and they'll rewind to the start of the first boxset. For others it'll be like the end of a long prison sentence.As for the inhabitants of the Abbey, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The world now knows him as Lord Crawley, stiff-backed in white tie and tails, regimental garb or, for relaxation, tweed. But before he became the face of Downton Abbey – and of bumbling institutional incompetence in Twenty Twelve and W1A – Hugh Bonneville could be seen in roles of considerable depth and range, including a moving Philip Larkin and a brutish husband in the BBC's Daniel Deronda.The evidence was The Cazalets (pictured below), a stately six-part tour of well-to-do town and country folk as Blighty prepares to stand alone against Hitler. It was broadcast all the way back Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“But I do want to be stuck with you.” Five series and five Christmas specials down, Downton fans heard a line of dialogue they had no idea they’d been waiting for all this time. Never mind that the scenario was a straight lift from The Remains of the Day, in which the stuffy old butler proposes to the starchy old housekeeper. Stone the crows and knock us all down with a feather, Carson popped the question to Mrs Hughes. And what, of all the wonderfully blindsiding things, did she say in reply? “I thought you’d never ask.” Jim Carter and Phyllis Logan, the show’s gnarliest pair of troopers, Read more ...
fisun.guner
It won’t come as much of a surprise to find that the staff at Tatler are a bit on the posh side – who’d have thought? – but I honestly doubt they’re that much posher than, say, those at The Times, or The Guardian, or that other esteemed people’s champion, the New Statesman. As for the “posh to common” ratio on theartsdesk – without doing an exact head count, I’m not sure we radically break the mould, either. Such is the way the world rock ’n’ rolls in class-ridden Britain. I have no doubt that the posh will always be with us. But, really, has their presence ever been more forcefully felt Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On and on the stately galleon sails. The fifth wodge of Downton Abbey has been light on utter knuckle-gnawing preposterousness. Plots conjured up at random from thin air have been in slightly shorter supply than usual. The very worst you can say of it is that Lord Fellowes is no Agatha Christie. The poor old blighted Bateses have now been subject to a matching pair of cack-handed murder mysteries. To get accidentally banged up once in a slow-moving crime plot may be counted a misfortune. Twice looks like cluelessness.Last night brought further proof that the upper classes are just as capable Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A year ago it was all so different. Lady Mary gave birth and on his way home from the delivery suite Cousin Matthew steered his vintage soft-top into a tree trunk. There's rather less to report from Downton Abbey (***) this Christmas and the Daily Telegraph is free to devote its Boxing Day front page to something else. No actor has asked to be written out of the series, no one got engaged or even kissed, no one ended up in prison or even tears. His Lordship came dressed as Santa Claus, although he claimed to be wearing the uniform of a Lord Lieutenant.The yawning sense that there is nothing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So, another series down and what do we know? First up, until this final episode no one had died either by contractual agreement or Fellowesian godlike decree. We’ve had a rape, an unwanted pregnancy, a near abortion, a mysterious disappearance and a spot of senile dementia. Plus not one but two uppity colonial singers have drifted upstairs. If it weren’t for the vowels and the coat-tails, this could be Emmerdale, tackling urgent social issues in a Yorkshire accent and congratulating itself on the column inches the morning after. Why else all the animal husbandry?And still nothing much seems Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"The price of great love is great misery when one of you dies," intoned the Earl of Grantham lugubriously in this fourth-season opener [****], and the death of Matthew Crawley hovered heavily over the household. His widow Lady Mary haunted the corridors like the Woman in Black, speaking in an even more dolorous monotone than usual. The great Penelope Wilton imbued Matthew's mother Isobel with a piercingly real sense of grief.However, writer Julian Fellowes ensures that events flash past at astounding speed in the beloved national institution that is Downton Abbey, whether it's a love affair Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last November, for the 25,000th time on the stage, the actor playing Sergeant Trotter in The Mousetrap stepped forward during the curtain call and asked members of the audience not to reveal the play's surprise ending to others. To do so would, by implication, spoil the whodunnit for future audiences. Over the years the odd clever-clogs stand-up has disobeyed the injunction. And whoever wrote the play’s Wikipedia entry also gives the game away. The play being an old warhorse that even Agatha Christie thought no more than workmanlike, the revelation is all The Mousetrap has, and it has been Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I was going to make a strenuous effort not to give away the ending, but since it's all over the front pages of the newspapers there's not much point. This rambling Downton special spent two hours going nowhere in particular, albeit very charmingly, but Julian Fellowes had been keeping his knuckledusters hidden behind his back. In the closing few minutes, he gave us the new heir of Downton and got rid of the previous one, the much-loved Matthew Crawley.Apparently Dan Stevens, who played Matthew, decided as long ago as February that he was leaving the show, so he might have expected a slightly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Julian Fellowes has often seemed to treat Downton Abbey as a speed-writing contest, with momentous events and the tide of history whirling past like roof tiles in a typhoon. Happily, as series three has developed, the pace has evened out a bit, though Shirley MacLaine's Mrs Levinson barely lasted as long as the disfigured pretender to the Downton inheritance in series two, while the storyline in which Downton was financially ruined and then promptly saved by Matthew's convenient inheritance was straight from the Peter Pan book of screenwriting.It remains addictively watchable, and this season Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You suspected she was a goner the moment the doctors started to front up like King Kong and Godzilla. Having given birth to a girl, the rebellious bluestocking Lady Sybil got her marching orders last night on Downton Abbey and Jessica Brown Findlay’s husky larynx will be heard no more pouring oil on troubled waters. The rest of the cast can rely on a berth in Julian Fellowes’ gilded prison for all eternity. Ms Brown Findlay is available for work.Seasoned Downtonians should have known something of this order was on the cards. The second series was absolutely rife with death and doom and Read more ...