The final season of Downton Abbey just got going on PBS in the US and, as those who saw it in Britain last year already know, it has a sufficiently sad, end of an era air about it to make one practically mourn the passing of formalised inequality. The Dowager Countess is laying off staff, Lord Grantham is wondering if he still needs an under butler, and the neighbouring estates are being sold off to new money. The country, in other words, is going to the dogs.
The cleverest thing about this series has been just how skilfully it has provoked its audience to mirror the responses and expectations of its characters, so that when, in this season’s first episode, a blackmailer barges her way into Lady Mary’s bedroom, one is not affronted because she’s a criminal, but because she’s a chambermaid without permission to be there.
This is not, as has been suggested by some of the show’s critics, because Julian Fellowes identifies too flagrantly with the upper classes, or rather the question of whether he does or not is irrelevant. The horror one feels when a servant is rude in Downton is just a function of how thoroughly the world of the show has been created – so thoroughly that one buys into it to the extent of sympathising against one’s own interests. The vast majority of us busily empathising with Lady Mary would have been shovelling coal in her fireplace, or helping her put on a dress that cost more than a year’s wages.
In the US, there have been a lot of Downton spin-offs that might have been funded by the English tourist board, focusing on the history of various palaces and stately homes, and a documentary fronted by the expert who advised the Downton cast on period etiquette.
None of them captures the charm of the show. In the final season, as political consciousness finally seeps through the servants’ quarters – Daisy the maid referred caustically to the unfairness of “the system” this week, imagine! – the nostalgia is working against itself. When a servant expresses the view that working in a shop is better than being in service, we sigh with Carson not out of sympathy for the aristos, but at the passing of time. Obsolescence comes to us all in the end.
That’s the ticket
The record-breaking Powerball lottery draw has been made, rendering a lucky trio from California, Tennessee and Florida up to $1.5bn richer (minus the 30% tax deduction if they happen not to be a US citizen). Everyone else has gone back to work. One of the most enjoyable spectacles of the whole Powerball episode has not been the fantasy of winning the biggest jackpot in history, but the scene in every drugstore in my New York neighbourhood, some of which had lines out the door this afternoon, full of people squinting at lottery cards they were clearly filling in for the first time in their lives. Multidraw, Powerplay, Quick Pick or Personal Selection – who knew it was this hard? Worth it though. Choose the right numbers and life in a modern day Downton could be yours, servants – sorry, personal assistants – and all.
Ricky’s golden moment
Ricky Gervais’s turn as host of the Golden Globes seems to have rehabilitated him again, after a period in which he was widely thought to be Too Bloody Much. Thanks to Twitter, the cycle of celebrities falling in and out of favour is as short as a single bad tweet and some of Gervais’s targets have been considered too soft recently. But on Sunday night, he found a deserving victim. Whatever a man’s faults, it’s hard for him to look bad when he’s standing next to Mel Gibson.
@emmabrockes
