We waited with bated breath for the onslaught, just like the soldiers in the trenches, but mercifully instead of guns and shells we only expected clichés: zeppelins, nurses, shell-shock, telegrams and tears, disillusion, emancipation etc. etc.
There is some alchemy to this drama. It does very little more than update 'Upstairs Downstairs' for a 21st Century audience, utilising all the storylines that may not have been so familiar to viewers in the 1970s, and yet... it's undeniably watchable. Much has been said of its wide appeal: the toffs, the oiks, the grand houses and pretty frocks, the intrigues and romance and now wartime tragedy. Well, we're not surprised that Mr Fellowes didn't change a thing from series one, adhering to the usual adage of 'if it ain't broke...', or rather, 'if it happens that it works...' The characters, then, have not sprung to 3-dimensional life but remained easily definable as hero or villain.
So, we started as we were bound to go on, with a shot of a muddy trench, and sure enough there were the white feathers, the upper-class-gal-becomes-nurse and the soldier so desperate to leave the front he deliberately incurs injury. Odds for the wound not being severe enough and a subsequent desertion are lowering by the minute. In addition to the stock stories of war we have the stock stories of love, too, with the chauffeur declaring his adoration of Lady Sybil and the once-bitten valet romancing a maid. Then there's Lady Mary, devastated by Matthew Crawley's engagement to - quel horreur! - a commoner. This is the same Lady Mary who, in the last series, for purposes of dramatic entertainment and seemingly very little else, dithered over whether to marry her beloved Matthew when it looked like he might lose his status as heir to Downton. Her prospects otherwise were not so rosy, in the light of gossip about a Turkish diplomat dying in her bed, but maybe she foresaw freedom and flapperdom on the horizon? Unlike any of her family, who are now busy looking aghast at all the changes.
By themselves, the broad brushes are not offensive. A period drama set in a country house and scripted by Julian Fellowes was never likely to be edgy or controversial, and there is something cosy about Sunday night comfort-blanket entertainment that's as easy on the other four senses as on the eye. Our excuse (OK, Ali's excuse) is a love of history, but that same love creates the minor irritations, the pea under all the mattresses, if that isn't too impertinent a thing for a red-blooded female ('gal' if you must) to say? There is the inevitable expositional, on-the-nose dialogue, with characters telling others what they would already know of an 'I need to explain this to you' variety. This is brought about by clumsy set-ups. It's true that, despite the rigid rules that governed, there were no absolutes in 1916 any more than in 2011, so rules were bent and broken, but an Earl saying to his valet that he thought they were friends? That same valet accepting a life of misery rather than say to his employer that his dissolute wife had him over a barrel concerning a Crawley family scandal? Servants questioning their employers unasked and the Dowager Countess remembering the servants' names? Well, 'Downton' on television has far fewer than 'Downton' in real life, aka Highclere Castle, would have had, so it probably isn't difficult to recall who's who.
So why watch? There's 'Spooks' on the other side (next up...), emails waiting to be answered, or there's Scrabble in the cupboard, a guest dessert chef at the local bar. Maybe it's the displacement to distant times, places and people of danger, fear and disappointment from the wars, crises, civil unrest, disasters, scandals and corruption that we absorb most of the time. Or maybe it's just fun, and a change from murder. If Julian Fellowes changes anything, let it please not be turning 'Downton' into the whodunnit 'Gosford Park'. As Dowager Maggie says, one does hate drama that happens offstage.
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