Jayne Dawson: The fast show
I am, of course, a fan of Downton Abbey. How could I not be?
There may be much nostalgia in the world already, but there is not nearly enough of it on television right now. Downton is filling the gap – sort of.
But, sumptuous as it looks, it leaves me pining for the sight of Judi Dench in a bonnet.
Because Downton Abbey is a period drama in appearance only – everything else about it is as modern as can be.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m grateful for the look of the thing. Who knew that dresses at the time of the First World War were quite so beautiful? I always thought of it as a period of awkward clothing, coming after the momentous glories of the crinoline and before the sassy shimmy of the 1920s. But I was wrong.
But style and content are two different things. In Downton, the style is lush but the content is pure soap opera.
Here, there is no old-fashioned meandering, no gentle development of plot and character. Were the wonderful Judi Dench to make an appearance, she would be quickly exhausted by the frantic goings-on.
Downton Abbey moves at a cracking pace. Each scene is now so short that to blink is to run the risk of entirely missing a major development.
From the opening shots of a beautiful house, off we gallop: from kitchen to drawing room to battlefield to deathbed and back again.
Characters take umbrage, leave, come back, fall in love, get injured, become impotent, die, lose their reputations, take up nursing, and write nasty letters at a very 21st century pace.
And it sounds all wrong. Looks delicious but sounds wrong. As the actors speak their one-liners – all there is time for before the next scene is upon us – words and phrases that sound entirely modern fall from their mouths.
Only this week we were being told by Thomas the evil former footman that “the devil is in the detail”, a phrase which came into vogue very recently indeed.
And there are modern attitudes in all the wrong places. Would the wife of a servant in 1917 really have thought to take her tale of scandal to a newspaper and expect to sign an exclusivity contract preventing her from selling that story elsewhere? I think not.
So it has been far too long since demureness, coyness and society’s cruel conventions were key to a drama’s plot.
There is a lack of bodices, corsets, bare shoulders gleaming by candlelight, and men in manly riding boots.
And, crucially, it has been far too long since we were treated to some really good flirtation involving the use of a fan and the arch of an eyebrow. In Downton, we are way beyond all that.
But Downton Abbey is supplying none of the above.
It’s all good-looking nonsense. Only Dame Maggie Smith sounds marvellously old-fashioned. For the rest, it’s only a matter of time before Essex speak creeps in and Mary is telling her newly-impotent love of her life that his situation is making her “totes emosh” (see last week, but if you can’t be bothered, it means “totally emotional”).
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