Prepare for stiff upper lips to wobble. Clutch monogrammed hankies for period-appropriate eye-dabbing. After 15 years on our screens, the Downton Abbey saga is about to hop in its vintage Rolls and drive off into the soft-focus sunset. The third and final film spin-off, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, is released this Friday, accompanied by a forelock-tugging farewell ITV documentary.
For six series, Downton bestrode the Sunday night schedules like a Grade II-listed colossus. Writer Julian Fellowes’s upstairs-downstairs creation followed entitled aristos and their salt-of-the-earth servants at a fictional country pile. Sure, the dialogue was clumsy, the plots soapy and the historical exposition clunked like a stately home’s antique radiators. Yet somehow, it didn’t matter.
Downton was watched by an estimated 120 million people worldwide. It won three Golden Globes, four Baftas and a whopping 15 Emmys, becoming one of British TV’s most successful exports of all time. Film sequels soon swept into cinemas, knocking over popcorn buckets with their bustles and grossing almost $300m (£222m) at the global box office.
Now, like the crumbling dream of aristocratic England it portrayed, it’s coming to an end. But what were the haw-hawing highlights? And what were the tweed-clad low points? Come with us as we ask our underpaid but grateful butler to pass the best claret and press rewind …
The five best
Matthew Crawley’s smashing Christmas
Across three series of sherry-sipping, pearl-clutching and low-stakes plotting, Downton had established itself as one of the cosiest treats on TV. So it came as a sucker punch at Christmas 2012 when Fellowes made the nation choke on its Quality Street. Mere hours after wife, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), had given birth to a son and heir, Matthew and his floppy fringe were devastatingly killed off in a car crash. As his vintage motor lay upside down in a ditch, the camera festively lingered on his lifeless eyes and pooling blood. Roll credits. Actor Dan Stevens went on to big things in Hollywood, but the Scrooge-like plot twist became known as “How Downton Ruined Christmas”.
Everything the Dowager Countess ever said
“Don’t be defeatist, dear, it’s very middle class.” Downton’s defining character was tart-tongued diva Violet Crawley, brought to owl-like life by the late Maggie Smith. Her innocent inquiry of “What is a weekend?” will go down in toff TV history. The pampered posho’s haughty face-pulling and delicious line delivery were a weekly highlight. Her pince-nez would pop off at a cutlery-based crime. Her nostrils flared in horror at some ghastly commoner’s etiquette error. Even her last words were positively Wildean, telling a blubbing lady’s maid at her bedside: “Stop that noise, I can’t hear myself die.”
Lady Mary’s Turkish delight
You’d think actor Theo James – him of White Lotus douchebag pedigree – could handle himself in a sex scene, but 15 years ago, the virgin Mary quite literally shagged him to death. James popped up in series one as Turkish diplomat Kemal Pamuk, who stopped off at Downton after a peace conference. During a scandalous night of passion with the Earl of Grantham’s eldest daughter, Pamuk dropped dead from a heart attack. A spot of nocturnal corpse removal helped hush it up. Fellowes has admitted that the plotline was pilfered from real life. “That was completely true,” he said. “A guest had smuggled in a man who then had a heart attack. They carried this dead body the length of one of England’s great houses, got him into his right bed and the story never got out.” What a way to go. Downton legend has it that the ghost of Mr Pamuk still haunts the back passage.
Romance below stairs
Those toffs upstairs are all very well, but it’s the plucky plebs who provided the show’s heart and soul. Downton devotees grinned ear to ear when romance blossomed between honourable valet Mr Bates (Brendan Coyle) and loyal lady’s maid Anna (Joanne Froggatt). The couple had all manner of black-clad misery heaped upon them – murder trials, rapes, miscarriages, gratuitous limps – but lower-class love conquered all. Their cockle-warming arc was surpassed only by the Remains of the Day-style slow-burn courtship between butler Carson (Jim Carter) and housekeeper Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan). This was further improved by a comical prenuptial subplot where Mrs Hughes roped in cook Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol) to find out if Carson expected their union to be consummated. Cue a barrage of ye olde euphemisms: “Have you fully considered every aspect of marriage? Will she be expected to perform all wifely duties? Do you wish her to share your, er, way of life?” Carson’s eyebrows raised so far they hovered near the chandeliers.
When Sybil made us snivel
When he wrote the script where the youngest Crawley sister died in childbirth, Fellowes confessed that he was “absolutely streaming with tears’’. You and us both, babes. Having boldly crossed the class divide to marry Irish chauffeur Tom “no relation to Richard” Branson (Allen Leech), husky-voiced, gold-hearted Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay) gave birth to a baby girl. However, her bumptious father and his fancy London doctor ignored the warnings of village physician Dr Clarkson, refusing to take her to hospital. Sybil promptly died from the complications of pre-eclampsia. Her heartbroken husband named their daughter Sybbie in tribute. Stop it, you’ll set me off again.
The five worst
Walk, don’t walk
Shot in the spine and sent home wounded from the first world war, that nice Matthew Crawley was told that he’d be paralysed for life from the waist down and unable to father children. Gasp! What did this mean for dear old Downton’s uncertain future? Fear not, ye of little faith. It was a mere two episodes before Matthew miraculously regained feeling in his legs and instinctively leapt from his wheelchair to help Lavinia Swire (Zoe Boyle) when she tripped over and dropped a tea tray, gallantly catching her as she fell. They should turn it into a NHS treatment.
That dog’s derriere on the opening titles
Poor Isis the labrador. Not only did her name become deeply awkward during the rise of the Islamic State terrorist organisation. She was also subjected to the doggy indignity of a lingering shot of her backside on the opening credits. As the Earl of Grantham strode across the rolling grounds towards his stately home, his hound trotted alongside, bum oscillating in and out of view as her tail wagged. Isis was eventually killed off and replaced by an Andrex puppy called Teo, but out of respect, her fluffy derriere remained on the credits. It’s what she would have wanted.
Spratt’s entertainment
Lady Edith’s main function was to be unlucky in love and live in the flapper girl-shaped shadow of elder sister Mary. By series five, however, she’d become a career woman. Kind of. As Edith edited a new-fangled magazine in “that” London, society was abuzz with speculation about the identity of its anonymous agony aunt Cassandra – a sort of proto-Lady Whistledown from Bridgerton. Who lay behind this mysterious nom de plume? In a camply implausible development, step forward the Dowager Countess’s bumbling butler Septimus Spratt (Jeremy Swift) – a sort of male Mrs Overall with a face like a wet weekend in Whitby. Who else? It’s a wonder Spratt found time for moonlighting, what with his interminable feud with lippy lady’s maid Mrs Denker (Sue Johnston).
O’Brien gets her ladyship in a lather
Along with scheming footman Thomas Barrow, evil lady’s maid Miss O’Brien (Siobhan Finneran) was the hiss-boo panto villain of the early series. Her most dastardly trick was the literal stuff of soap opera. Under the misapprehension that she was about to be sacked, O’Brien slyly planted a wet bar of carbolic soap on the floor beside her mistress’s bath. Pregnant Cora Crawley (Elizabeth McGovern) slipped on it and miscarried. O’Brien, in her defence, did appear full of remorse for a scene or two, before normal devious service was resumed. Sadly, it’s also the last mildly interesting storyline that Cora got.
Spew Bonneville
Dinnertime gore-fests are more traditionally associated with Game of Thrones. But anything Westeros can do, the landed gentry can do more ludicrously. There had been clumsy foreshadowing of Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) having stomach problems, with the peaky patriarch grumbling about “a bit of indigestion”. Nobody expected a scene worthy of The Exorcist. During a dinner for visiting health minister (and future PM) Neville Chamberlain, the Earl’s ulcer burst and he projectile-vomited blood all over the dinner table and assembled guests. While the Earl was carted off for emergency surgery, diners daintily wiped scarlet spatter off their pearls and tiaras, before sending for another pot of Mrs Patmore’s coffee. Has Vanish stain remover been invented yet, my lordship?