The other weekend the Fawn and I were invited to stay at Chilham Castle. Obviously, if you’re Charles Moore, this is no big deal because it’s the kind of thing you do 24/7, 365 days of the year. For us, though — me especially, the Fawn being slightly posher than me — it was a revelation. ‘Bloody hell!’ I thought. ‘This is totally fantastic. Why isn’t my life like this all the time?’
And I found myself wishing dear Hugh Massingberd were still alive. He would have understood perfectly when I rang him up to boast. Private Eye called him ‘Massivesnob’ but as Hugh knew snobbery has little to do with it.
You don’t need to be grand to land an invitation to one of the great English (or Scottish) houses. Just interesting. Or funny. Or beautiful. Or soundly right-wing. Or crazily eccentric. Or a writer. Or a decent bridge player. Or whatever special quality your hosts think you might have to help make the most interesting and pleasant social mix for that weekend. It’s an art form — perhaps the greatest of all English art forms. And it all centres on the most important thing of all: the great house itself, whose splendour, beauty, history and sheer delight its generous owners are determined to share with as many like-minded folk as they can muster.
Alternatively, there’s always Downton Abbey (ITV1, Sunday). I said Hugh wasn’t snobbish, which is true up to a point. But one thing he was very hot on was any kind of ahistoricism or social solecism or capitulation to popular ignorance, and I’m sure he would have sat down in front of his TV, pen and paper in hand, ready to scrawl in his illegible script the more egregious examples.
These were the ones I noticed.
1. ‘It’s a great day for Downton to welcome a duke under our roof,’ declares pompous, stuffy but reliably Hudsonesque butler Carson to the staff. Well, hang on a second. Downton is a pretty significant house (in real life, it’s Highclere Castle, home of the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon) and it’s owned by the ‘Earl of Grantham’. Are visits by dukes really likely to be so rare that they deserve celebrating with a special speech?
2. ‘Funny, our job…’ One of the servants, I forget which, is caught in an unguarded moment with Carson, meditating on the strangeness of a career in service. This enables Carson to reply that the only family he’s got is his Downton family. Fine, except it’s a bit like having a Roman saying: ‘Funny, isn’t it, the way we feed Christians to lions and think it’s perfectly normal…’ or a plantation owner saying, ‘Funny, isn’t it, that we don’t give black men equal rights’ or…you get the idea.
3. For me, this was the worst. It happened right at the beginning when, using the same dramatic device that was once deployed in Upstairs, Downstairs — but why not? — the series revealed that the Titanic had sunk taking various significant characters down with it.
And the Earl’s (Hugh Bonneville) reaction? Why, immediately to assume that the first-class passengers will have enjoyed a better chance of escape than the ones on the lower decks and to bemoan their fate: ‘Poor devils!’ Since the series is set in 1912 and James Cameron hadn’t filmed that particular version of events till 1997, I think it unlikely that the Earl would have had the chance to be culturally brainwashed into such a response. Unless, perhaps, we are to learn in a later episode that the Earl is possessed of clairvoyant powers.
I rather hope he is, because at the moment he is proving to be by far the weakest link in the drama. His main characteristic: niceness. Closely followed by honourable decency. This works well enough for plot purposes: making us feel all warm and gooey at the end when he decides at the last second that, no, he won’t sack his agreeable ex-war-comrade valet for being crippled; resisting the temptation to have the entail of the estate altered so that it goes to his daughter, and not to this impecunious, distant cousin and future heir, whom he has never met. But for a central character, he’s worryingly cipher-like.
But, look, I make these criticisms because it is fun to do so rather than because the series is rubbish. Overall, I’d say, series creator and screenwriter Julian Fellowes (who else?) has done a fine job, steering a confident course between the needs of arsey purists like me — who actually know the order of precedence between dukes, marquesses and earls — and the vast majority of potential viewers (in the US especially) who need to be told about stuff like primogeniture through the hackneyed (but swift, effective and necessary) device of having the new maid character who doesn’t know what’s what and needs it all explained.
Downton Abbey is decently plotted; handsomely acted (above all, of course, by Maggie Smith); sumptuously located; pacily scripted and packed with amusing historical detail, such as the Dowager Countess’s appalled reaction to the glare of these hideous newfangled electric lights. It is destined to become a Sunday-night essential. Bravo, Fellowes!
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