Just Williams

‘In my rented smoking jacket, I’m sometimes mistaken for a distant doublebarrelled cousin’

Simon plays lord of the manor

WHEN WE WERE making Upstairs, Downstairs, the ’70s drama set in an Edwardian household, we had a fan letter from a blue-blooded old biddy, ‘… such an appropriate title, as we watch it upstairs on the new colour set in the drawing room, and the servants watch it downstairs in black and white’. The green baize door was still there to keep us in our place. Not a lot of people know that the whole series was recorded in a studio, and, rather surprisingly given the title, it was all done on one level – the eponymous stairs went nowhere, neither up nor down nor into my lady’s chamber. All the interiors, from the morning room with its sash windows and elegant fireplace, to the servants’ pokey attic bedrooms, were just scenery.

But these days, with Downton Abbey,

you get the real noble Mccoy – filmed at Highclere Castle in its Capability Brown parkland. Being nominally posh, I have filmed in some wonderfully grandiose houses, often as the titled proprietor. Impoverished aristocrats are eager to lease out their crumbling homes to film companies – they’ve tried zip-wires and go-karts and Antiques Roadshow , but nothing beats a long-running series to swell their coffers. Ruefully they mutter about inheritance tax and the fees at Eton. As the location caterers serve up breakfast in their stable block, they roll up, pinkly trousered, for a bacon sarnie. ‘Wizard fun!’ In A Handful of Dust, you can glimpse the late Duke of Norfolk in his family home, Castle Howard, playing the walk-on part of a gardener genially doffing his cap to the stars of the film.

These landowners look on anxiously as set designers go to work, rearranging or replacing their ancient heirlooms – the fake trappings often improving the shabby chic they’ve grown accustomed to. In my rented smoking jacket, they sometimes mistake me for a distant double-barrelled cousin and ask me for a drink after work. No queuing up with the riff-raff – I get the fast-track tour. En route to a hefty G&T, we’ll give the Louis XV tables and the Chippendale chairs a quick nod. We’ll skitter past the Reynolds portraits of their ancestors; chinless to a man, stroking a spaniel or sitting on a horse with a tiny head. Many of them, I’m told with relish, were born the wrong side of the blanket or culled in duels; muddying the gene pool beyond recognition.

In the private rooms we’ll leave behind the smell of beeswax and the gloom of William Morris, and enter a brighter world of Farrow & Ball, unkempt sofas, and even an Ikea coffee table. There’s Nintendo and Peppa Pig

and dogs and family photographs: skiing, surfing, fishing, marrying – all the stuff and scruff of lesser mortals. Simon is in Alan Bennett’s Allelujah! at the Bridge Theatre until 29 September