The Manor Maketh the Man

Kahukura by Robyn Kahukiwa

Ever since he won the screenplay Oscar for his somewhat populous Gosford Park in 2001, it seems like screenwriter Julian Fellowes has been making to-the-manner-born TV series and films. Truth is, he also co-writes stuff like the dire The Tourist, but never mind.

His supreme achievement, in my humble opinion, is a series that has just ended. The first season of Downton Abbey has left me somewhat breathless. Another eight episodes have been commissioned and I can’t wait, partially because I can watch it at home and shout at my children if they eat sweets as noisily as people do here in cinemas.

But why is it so good? Partially because it at least acknowledges that British society did not (it is set just before the Great War) and does not merely consists of the rich, royal, famous and boring. 

Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), runs the manor and seems to spend most of his time being humane to his many servants, who have lives and secrets of their own. The rest of his time is spent being run by his three daughters.

Oddly, in Fellowes’ current feature film, From Time to Time, Bonneville appears as a humane captain at sea who brings a friend home for his blind daughter. That friend is black and his wife, a Dutch woman (Carice van Houten), is outraged. She rather likes gambling, which is rather un-Dutch, but never mind again.

But the big glue in both instances is Maggie Smith. In Abbey she can turn the most innocuous line into a comic feast of irony, ambiguity and manipulation. In the final episode the manor gets a telephone and electricity and Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, says she feels like she’s living in an HG Wells novel as if nothing could possibly be worse.

In the feature film (as people crinkle their lolly papers), a young boy visits his granny (Smith) and awaits his father’s return from World War Two. But he can see ghosts from the past and it turns out to be a good old fashioned spook mystery. It’s also shot a bit like a dusty novel from before the war, but one constantly has to remind oneself that Smith is playing a nice old lady here, not Violet.

In the series she is simply magnificent.

What we want to know in it, of course, and among many others, is who is going to inherit the bloody manor; are Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) and her solicitor cousin Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) going to finally get together; is the enigmatic butler John Bates (Brendan Coyle) going to stop being so bloody honourable and marry the maid Anna (Joanne Froggat); and are the nasty toff, Lady Edith Crawley (Laura Carmichael), wicked (and gay) first footman Thomas (Rob James-Collier) and scheming Irish maid Sarah O’Brien (Siobhan Finneran) going to get their comeuppance?

And those are just some of the plots; there are many more.

But the main reasons why the series works so well is because it is set in a real manor, not a TV studio acting as New York; and it is exceptionally well written, directed and acted, easily accommodating no less than 16 main characters. It will not survive a Marxist reading, even though one of the drivers is a socialist, but it is still class entertainment, pun fully intended.

In the meantime, we’ll have to do with the breathless excitement (not to mention unintended comedy) of David Attenborough’s First Life on Sunday Night Prime. At 85 the man is unstoppable.

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The featured screenprint's title is the Maori name for the red admiral butterfly. It's part of a Native New Zealand series artist Kahukiwa has been doing over the last 10 years in various media. Most of the images, she says, feature Maori women with native flora and fauna.

 

Neil Sonnekus