Forget the champagne and jets... all I need is Downton

Mail OnLine
By Liz Jones

Last updated at 11:03 AM on 6th November 2011

I have a guilty secret. You might think I’m off jet-setting around the world, staying in Ibizan villas, hob-nobbing with the famous, drinking champagne in Cannes while sheltering from Twitter storms.

The truth is I have an addiction and rather a shameful one, given the critical mauling my fix of choice has been getting.

Tonight, I will be poised in front of the telly for my weekly high point. No one is allowed to talk or bark.

Liz Jones has a deep secret... she loves Downton Abbey - not the wooden acting, but it's setting at Highclere Castle in Hampshire

Because I will be watching the last episode in the current series of Downton Abbey.

There is no better telly at the moment. The X Factor has not one contestant to set the hairs on the neck bristling.

EastEnders’ obsession with the Asian family has become boring. Sarah Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare seems too staged (who would host a Regency banquet in costume when you still have a roof to repair?) and Grand Designs too predictable – I always speed through the beginning of each episode as I cannot stand the mud and cement-mixing stage, finding it too stressful and messy.

Which brings me to one reason I love Downton Abbey so much: the building.

While the main staircase, the flooring in the hallway, the dimensions of the windows are breathtaking (the setting is Highclere in Berkshire), it is the utilitarian, minimalistic chic of downstairs I appreciate the most: the muted colours, the stone steps, the implements.

Like the Belgravian townhouse of Upstairs Downstairs, the house is the most important character of all, a Charles Barry monument to English superiority (he also rebuilt the Houses of Parliament).

The acting is, of course, terrible: the moustachioed doctor is laughably hammy.

Bar the wonderfully acerbic Maggie Smith, whose skin has a delightfully wrinkly appearance so rare these days when actresses succumb to Botox and facelifts, the women are wooden, particularly Jessica Brown-Findlay, who plays Lady Sybil.

Cutting ways: Maggie Smith's approach to life gets the thumbs up

The historical reference points are too obvious – Mary remarks on the new fashion for short hair in Paris while there is great sport to be had in learning to use the telephone.

The plot lines are execrable, too – whether Mr Bates goes, stays, murders his wife or ever loses that cane are of no consequence to me. Now that his lordship is snogging a parlour maid, it has all become a bit silly.

The fraternising between the classes would never have happened, surely. My paternal grandmother, born in 1884 in Terling, Essex, was a live-in housemaid. Her job was to get up before anyone else in the household to clean the grates and make the fires.

I still have her undergarments and have worked out that she had an 18in waist, even without a corset. Her life was terribly hard – much harder than it looks on the telly.

There was no glamour to it, no freedom. She was one of 13, which is just as well as her siblings dropped like flies. Little Willy drowned in the village pond while another brother perished in the trenches.

So, maybe, thinking about her life, the script is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Tragedy, death, destitution and shame lurked around every corner then.

What will the twenties bring? Perhaps Lord Grantham will lose everything in the stock market crash

But who cares about the verisimilitude of the show. The reason it works is that it reminds us of a time when there were no mini-roundabouts or automated phone lines.

Part of the thrill is that we know what the future holds in store. The post-Edwardian period is rendered infinitely more precious as it was so short-lived, like a mayfly.

I can’t wait for the Twenties to unfold in series three, for Mary to cut her hair and start chain-smoking. For Sybil to get pregnant by the chauffeur.

For Bates to be hanged for murder, gay Thomas to start snorting cocaine, the labrador to have puppies (I think the large-bottomed lab from series one has been usurped in series two with a sprightlier, svelte fellow – I’m almost moved to put in an FOI request) and Anna the maid to flatten her breasts.

The series would end with his lordship losing everything in the stock market crash.

There will be a Christmas episode before then, of course. It is bound to be stuffed full of retro porn – a giant tree, snow, old-fashioned toys, carols and various animals boiled and eviscerated (the show has balked at portraying the cruelty of the age, particularly that practised by the upper classes, who liked to blast creatures to smithereens. I’d have liked a few tiger skins on the walls, more guns crooked over tweed-clad arms and the myopic cook teaching Daisy how to jug a hare).

The success of the series has meant the real owners of the house have been able to fund badly needed restorations. What’s the betting there is a reality TV show in the pipeline about this, too?




Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2058027/Forget-champagne-jets--I-need-Downton-Abbey.html#ixzz1cw7tbMVO