Lady Mary has a voice so deep it’d make Brian Blessed tremble
This isn’t looking healthy. Lord Grantham has a touch of indigestion and, in the lethal world of Downton Abbey (iTV), that’s like having a twinge of ebola or being struck lightly by a falling steamroller.
Remember what happened to poor isis the labrador last year? she had a ‘touch of indigestion’ at breakfast and was terminal by bedtime. her portly hindquarters live on, but only in the opening credits.
Death is such a frequent visitor to the abbey that none of the earl’s grandchildren has t wo l i ving parents. sybbie’s mother died after childbirth, Marigold’s dad was clobbered by Nazi brownshirts before she was born, and George’s father saw him just once before driving headlong into a lorry.
The only immortal is the Dowager Countess (Maggie smith) who was dancing around the library in an electric mauve gown, whisking the tip of her walking cane in her son’s face while, like a fencer, crying ‘ en garde!’. Death would be afraid to come near her.
if the earl (hugh Bonneville) succumbs — and no one at Downton has ever survived a stomach ache — who will run the stately home? his heir is the four-year-old George.
Then there’s Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), the earl’s eldest child. she can inherit neither title nor estate because she’s female. That ought to be easily fixed, though... not by changing the law, but by changing Mary’s sex. she already rides like a man, farms pigs like a man and wears her dresses like a man. her voice is so deep it would make Brian Blessed tremble. All she needs is a briar pipe and a wife, and we could start calling her Lord Murray or perhaps Lord Martin.
instead, writer Julian Fellowes appeared to plump for another improbable solution. Ten minutes i nto the episode, ex- chauffeur Branson ( All e n Leech), t he wi d o wed husband of Lor d Grantham’s youngest daughter (long since dead of stomach ache), wrote from America to say he was missing Downton.
By the final scene, he was back, gatecrashing the wedding of the butler to the housekeeper. Branson looked porkier than before, but America will do that to a chap.
And he was beaming, certain that his in-laws would be thrilled to see him. in one choreographed movement they all turned their backs on the bride and groom, desperately relieved that their servants no longer had to be the centre of attention.
Branson’s return was hardly a surprise. The shocker was always that he chose to leave in the first place, when he had his meals cooked for him, free run of his lordship’s wine cellar and the unwaning envy of the servants’ quarter.
Chucking that in was like tearing up a jackpot-winning Lottery ticket. You can’t blame the fellow for deciding to come back.
Meanwhile, Anne-Marie Duff, as former WPC Claire Church, didn’t look nearly so happy about being dragged back to her past in From Darkness (BBC1). she had found herself the perfect location for a gripping murder mystery, on a hebridean i sle with j ust 43 residents, a single pub and a ferry that made the crossing from the mainland once a day.
What a set-up for an investigation, where the grudges go back generations and no secret is safe.
But this inspirational location turned out to be no more than a metaphor, supposed to show us how the WPC was burying herself in obscurity instead of facing the real world. Who could blame her? That ‘real world’ was a squalid, derelict quarter of Manchester, where the bodies of prostitutes murdered in the Nineties kept being uncovered.
The title was not apt. Nothing emerged ‘from darkness’. The theme was as black as molten tar, with endless shots of dead women bound and gagged.
And the lighting matched it. Claire went f or runs before dawn, she lay in bed staring at the ceiling with the lights off, and she tiptoed around the house at midnight.
The picture couldn’t have been any blacker with a bin-bag over the screen. At least that would have hidden the images of Manchester at its most miserable.