TV’S GONE TO TOWNTON

Toffs, social climbers, snarky servants and lashings of lust. JAN MOIR’s upper-crust guide to Belgravia, the new Downton

PRePARe yourself for the finest of bonnets, a cavalcade of corsetry and a hairy parade of the shaggiest mutton chop whiskers seen on TV since the final of Crufts. Welcome to Belgravia, the new six-part ITV drama set in high society London in the 19th century.

Many are calling it the new Downton Abbey, but not author Julian Fellowes, who wrote them both. Yes, Fellowes has adapted this series from his own novel of the same name and drafted in the same producers and directors who turned Downton into an international smash hit. But the similarities between the two dramas are rather scarce.

However, praise be — both do feature a patriarch who roars around in a complicated dressing gown, tassels a-flying as he shouts at everyone. In Downton it was bumbling Lord Grantham, who also liked to wear his robe when snogging maids in the sherry pantry.

Here it is victualler James Trenchard (Philip Glenister) who is angry with his wife Anne (Tamsin Greig) for betraying a confidence. ‘We’ve hidden it for more than a quarter of a century,’ he bellows in the first episode, and I am not spoiling anything by telling you he is not talking about a repeat game of hunt-the-thimble.

There is the same urgent Downtonish music to keep events moving along at a lickety- split pace, but there is no feather duster tinkling the chandelier to signify the spruce and unrelenting attentions of the below stairs mob. In fact, they are a rather weaselly lot, forever plotting and spying on their masters and betters.

Carson, that Minotaur- shouldered master of propriety, would be appalled at their everyday treachery. Nor is there anything as magnificent as Dowager Duchess Violet Grantham (Maggie Smith) dropping her delicious aphorisms like grenades.

LIKE Downton, Belgravia starts with a tragedy — only this one develops into a secret that threatens to engulf two families in scandal and could start or end a dynasty. The focus is on the fortunes of the two kinfolks connected by this secret; the rich and titled Brockenhursts and the merchant class Trenchards.

They all live as near neighbours in the newly built Belgravia at a time of great social change.

‘This spangled city for the rich, where we all live now,’ explains Lady Brockenhurst ( Harriet Walker), somehow managing to keep abreast of plot points while under attack from a quivering plume of purple feathers on her head. The old order is changing as the aristocracy is now forced to live cheek by jowl with self-made men such as Trenchard. He and his family embody one of Belgravia’s central themes — the arrival of the nouveaux riches and the emergence of the middle classes.

Sometimes evolution has a lot to answer for, don’t you think? In this Belgravia, the embryonic middle classes are worried about getting invites to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball and where they should sit in m’lady’s carriage. Today, some 180 years later they are wearing Boden and double-parking outside Waitrose to panic buy taramasalata. They don’t give a damn about anything or anyone, and this is supposed to be progress?

While in Downton the social tension was between the upstairs and downstairs, here the conflict is between new money and old.

Snobbery is rife. Just as well, for it is Julian Fellowes’ specialist subject. Snobbery is the steam in Fellowes’ engine, the rich gravy that sluices unchecked through his beloved england — and his fascination is ours, too. For the next six Sundays, a crack cast don’t hold back on the icy condescension, as the men fight for an inheritance and women battle to stake their own place in this new world.

At this drama’s heart are two matriarchs separated by a class divide, but united by terrible loss. Now read on . . .