‘When I first read the script I couldn’t put it down. I could see each character in my head when I had finished reading. That doesn’t happen very often.’
Hugh Bonneville ROBERT, EARL OF GRANTHAM
The story of Downton Abbey began with a dinner and an idea. The idea quickly became a concept for a television series, which was snapped up by ITV. Gareth Neame commissioned Julian Fellowes to write the first episode, and from the opening scene the script caught the imagination of the TV bosses who read it and recognised that they had something special.
ITV is the show’s natural home, Fellowes believes. There, he and Neame feel they are better able to present the house’s inhabitants as they envisage them, rather than getting mired in the social politics of a century ago, as might be the case at a more ‘interventionist’ rival.
‘For me, the contention that everything was horrible for everyone except for a few rather unpleasant aristocrats is as untrue as saying everything was marvellous for absolutely everyone,’ Fellowes says. ‘The truth, as always, lies somewhere between the two.
‘We were presenting this very structured, class-conscious society, but at the same time we would deal with all the characters within it with equal weight. We would make an assumption that most of them were trying to live the best lives they could, given the hand they had been dealt. I think that that sense of ordinary, non-heroic characters nevertheless being decent people who are trying to do their best is the central philosophy of Downton,’ he adds.
For Fellowes, the world of Downton Abbey had begun to take shape in his mind; from the large country house that embodied it to the people who inhabited it, from the major plotlines to the smaller events that they would experience along the way.
In order to create the scripts for this first series, Fellowes carefully mapped out, character by character, a community and the interactions between its members that would tell their story: the rivalry, jealousy, love, hatred, births, marriages and deaths. It was his attention to detail and his vision that has inspired cast and crew alike to become involved in the project.
‘When I first read the script I couldn’t put it down,’ remembers Hugh Bonneville, who went on to play Robert, Earl of Grantham. ‘I could see each character in my head when I had finished reading. That doesn’t happen very often.’
For Fellowes, the first character to take on life was Cora, Countess of Grantham. At the time he had been reading To Marry an English Lord, a book about the young American heiresses who had flocked to marry into the old English families during the Victorian era, to exchange their parents’ newly made wealth for a title and status. ‘But what was it like after that?’ he asked himself. ‘Many of these women were here for years after the way of life they had arrived to preserve had almost become history. What was it like living in a freezing house in Staffordshire which was hideously uncomfortable and far from their roots? The next generation, even the younger sisters of a lot of those women, would not succumb to the fashion for European titles. The sea receded, leaving these women stranded in an alien culture, with English or Scottish children. So I started to play with that.’
Once he had developed the characters of Cora and her husband, Robert, others began to take shape, each with their own dramatic function. The mysterious new valet Mr Bates provided a spur to the action with his sudden arrival at the house – ‘a very simple dramatic catalyst,’ says Neame. Anna, then head housemaid, emerged as the show’s moral compass, guiding the audience as to how we should view other characters and developments, while remaining far from saccharine. ‘When I read the first episode, straightaway I fell in love with Anna because I thought she was beautifully written,’ actress Joanne Froggatt remembers. ‘A really nice person, but not boring.’ Phyllis Logan (Mrs Hughes) agrees that for her the characters and their characterisation are an important element of the script’s appeal. ‘All the characters are, to my mind, well rounded and intriguing. There’s lots of light and shade to them. They are not one-dimensional and are fascinating to play.’
‘All the characters are, to my mind, well rounded and intriguing. There’s lots of light and shade to them. They are not one-dimensional and are fascinating to play.’
Phyllis Logan MRS HUGHES
The eldest daughter of the house, meanwhile, acted as the focus of its hopes and fears, as she still does. ‘You invest in all the characters, but if I had to come down to it, I would say my favourite is Mary,’ says Neame. ‘The overall dynamic of the show has always been about her future, whether it’s the succession issue in the first series, who was going to be the right man for her to marry, or the ups and downs in her relationship with Matthew. And knowing, as I do, where the story goes in the future, she will be at the heart of it.’
It is the storyline that brings the audience back for more, series after series, and this carefully managed plot is still very much the work of the show’s creators, Gareth Neame and Julian Fellowes. Since that first historic dinner, the pair have maintained a strong working partnership, with clearly defined roles in the creation of the show. Together they discuss the storylines and establish a broad overview of where they want to take each series, before Fellowes produces a first draft of every episode. Having started writing for the screen when he was a working actor, Fellowes has trained himself to write wherever he can, which has helped him to shoulder the writing single-handedly.
‘I wasn’t really allowed the luxury of, “I must write in this room, I can only write in these hours, I have to have my little [lucky] rabbit there,”’ he says. ‘That was forbidden me, so I had to work when I had two hours off and I was sitting in my dressing room or in a trailer or in a terrible hotel. I’m grateful for that, because today I can work on a train or stuck in an airport.’
On each draft script, Neame gives his notes – ‘what should be accented, what should be held back, “I like this storyline but I think we’ve missed this key scene”’ – and thus they work through the scripts until they are happy with them. It is a surprisingly intimate process for a show that is now so big. ‘By the time we finish series four, Julian and I will have discussed, debated and agreed every story in around 40 episodes,’ he says. ‘A lot of shows have more input from a wide group of people, and in those cases the writer can get stifled by myriad different opinions. This way, I can ensure the stories he wants to tell are brought to the screen.’
Through their partnership, Neame has discovered the sheer breadth of Fellowes’ talent as a writer. ‘I knew he could bring that world to life like nobody else,’ he says. ‘A massive part of the show’s success has been his extraordinary ability to write romance, hatred, rivalry, love, jealousy, laugh-out-loud humour and tragedy.’
The balance of all these elements within the scripts is delicately judged. ‘In a sense, we go for chuckles rather than guffaws,’ says Fellowes. ‘Once you are making a comedy, you’ve gone into a different place in people’s minds. We have to stop at the threshold.’ As he sees it, the humour has to fit with the reality of the stories and the characters. ‘We have established that Violet, for instance, is quite a witty woman and so we can give her cracks to make without disturbing her reality, because that is who she is. You could say the same for Mrs Patmore. So we’ve got two women above and below stairs who provide a lot of the humour.’
‘Inevitably there is going to be male interest
