My favorite night out with Dan was when we attended an Olympic Ball together in West London, and vowed not to tie one on, as it was a school night. Everything went well until—on our way out of the venue, pretty sober—we passed a bar.
“We need cider. For the taxi,” Dan said, decisively. And bought four bottles.
Obviously, by the time we’d chucked that down in the back of the cab, we were wasted before we were even halfway home, and ended up going back to my house, and drinking half pints of port while listening to records.
At 1 am I failed to find the record I was looking for—a bootleg of Elton John singing Nick Drake demos. Amazing—and went upstairs to wake my husband, who knows the location of all the records in our house.
“Pete,” I said, cross-eyed on port. “Downton wants Elton Drake. Semergency.”
He’s still in my mobile as “Downton.”
DOWNTON ABBEY REVIEW 1: LADY MARY’S HAUNTED VAGINA
Downton Abbey returned—finally, finally—on Sunday night. I’m sure you’re aware of this. You would have to have been on a spiritual retreat down a deep well, with your eyes closed, to have missed it—in the matter of promotion, ITV1 has been acting like a gangster-made-good, parading its beautiful-yet-spoiled daughter around a Mob restaurant, boasting about how beautiful she is.
“Have you seen her? Look at her! Look at her! She’s gorgeous,” all the channel’s full-page ads in the national press screamed. “Look at my little Downton. She’s real classy. Nominated for Emmys and everything. She’s my princess. Nuffink’s too good for her. Nuffink. If you touch her you’re dead, sunshine.”
But then, who can really blame ITV1’s pride? Downton is currently in the Guinness Book of Records as “the most critically-acclaimed television show of all time”—a fairly astonishing accolade when you bear in mind a) Twin Peaks, say, or Life on Earth; and b) Downton’s much more urgent deserving of another record: that of Guinness’s “silliest television show of all time.”
Honestly, Downton is off its chanks. Sometimes it plays as if writer Julian Fellowes sits at his writing bureau—overlooking his extensive lands, including three rivers—sucking on a helium balloon, and giggling as he starts bashing at his typewriter. This is, after all, the drama where an evil, chain-smoking maid caused her mistress to miscarry by deliberately leaving lilac-scented soap on the floor, which she slipped on. Yeah, that’s right. She killed the unborn Earl of Downton with soap. This is a plot twist not even Dynasty, at its most gibbering, considered.
So here we are in Episode One, Season Two. It is 1914. All we can see is a nightmare-ish vision of mud and barbed wire. Shells whistle and explode as men fall to the ground, broken. In the trenches, men no more than boys weep, lighting cigarettes with bloodied, muddied hands. There’s no two ways about it: this dinner party is going really badly.
Through the labyrinthine tunnels the cameras roam, until they find the man they seek: Matthew Crawley, played by Dan Stevens. In many ways, Crawley is the center of Downton’s world: as the middle-class solicitor now unexpectedly due to inherit Downton itself—plus one-half of the Lady Mary/Matthew Crawley on/off love story—Crawley’s character touches on every issue of class, destiny and desire.
More importantly than this, however, Crawley is unbelievably handsome. It is notable that, in this Stygian quagmire, he alone is immaculate. While everyone else looks like a bog troll, he is blonde, burnished and pristine. Perhaps the mud—being French—is asthetically highly-tuned enough to respect his beauty, and refuses to cling to his astonishingly well-cut trenchcoat and buttermilk skin, out of sheer love.
Either way up, Julian Fellowes knows the assembled nine million viewers haven’t rocked up to ITV1 for Wilfred Owen: The Movie. There are nine million Cup-A-Soups going undrunk as the audience shouts, “This is a bit of a downer. Where’s Maggie Smith looking snooty about someone using the wrong boot-buttoner?”
To this end, two minutes in, Matthew Crawley stares out into the middle distance of WAR.
“When I think of my life at Downton, it seems like a different world,” he says, impossibly yearning, as the scene fades to black.
And so we’re back to lovely old reassuring Downton itself, where all the things we yearn for occur: flighty maids making up beds with billowing linen; frisky footmen standing to attention as ladies alight from carriages; posh girls setting down their tortoiseshell-backed hair brushes and weeping over thwarted love affairs. Life is carrying on at Downton, despite the war—or “This DAMNED war,” to give it its full name.
And its full name is being used often. People are referring to the war a lot. Despite the First World War being, surely, one of the Top Ten Events It’s Unneccessary To Back-Ref, it seems any slight change to the domestic routine since Season One must be contextualized with a quick mention of the ongoing world-wide conflagration.
While this is amusing during a scene of overdue cushion-plumping in the drawing room—“There’s a war on. You cannot keep standards as high.”—it reached its apogee when Lady Sibyl bumped into Lady Cora in the hallway.
“This is early for you to be up, Mamma.”
“War makes early risers of us all.”
This begs the viewer to ask, “Really? Is the sound of shelling in the Dardenelles carrying all the way to Yorkshire?”
As well as being a hinderance to cushion plumpness, war, we discover, is also a massive bummer. Lady Sibyl receives a letter telling her a former beau, Tom, has caught it in Flanders.
“Sometimes, it feels as if all the men I’ve ever danced with are dead,” she sighs. Darling, I’ve been to office Christmas parties too. I know exactly how you feel.
And it seems love is being thwarted left, right and center. Sexy DILF butler Bates looks like he’s finally going to get it on with housemaid Anna, after spending all of Season One mooning after her like a calf on Wobbly Eggs. He even gets around to telling her his plans for their future life:
“I want to open a little hotel, in the countryside,” he says, holding her hand outside the scullery.
The Bates Hotel? Really? That’s honestly his plan? You can imagine Julian Fellowes taking a particularly huge hit off his helium tank as he wrote that line. As fans of the show will know, Fellowes seems to reserve all his most wiggy helium moments for Bates. Bates, let us not forget, was the one who wore a “secret leg-stretching contraption” in Season One—until he wearied of the pain, and hurled it into a lake.
Anyway, Bates’s Season One Secret Leg Contraption Agony is as nothing compared to the torments Fellowes has for him in Season Two: seconds after announcing his Bates Love Hotel plan, Bates’s evil, estranged wife turns up to banjax everything.
Understandably, one-legged, love-calf Bates is initially unwilling to receive her—keeping her waiting in the kitchen for half an hour.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Vera,” he says, finally arriving. “I’ve been . . . up in the lofts. Sorting out . . . some cupboards.”
One look at Vera Bates’s Super Evil face tells you that, with excuses like this, Bates is gonna be dog-food. She will screw him over, right into Season Three. All housemaid Anna can do is run off, and cry into her apron near a butter churn.
Upstairs, and love is equally complex. Home on leave, the luminously handsome Matthew Crawley attends a fundraising concert at Downton, allowing him to bump into Lady Mary for the first time since she dumped him, then he dumped her back (it’s complicated. Just go with it).
Despite Matthew now being engaged to the sappy Lady Lavinia, and Lady Mary being pursued by Richard Carlisle (“You mean Sir Richard Carlisle? Who runs all those ghastly newspapers?” Lord Crawley expositions, handily. Often, Downton might well be renamed Exposition Abbey), we know Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley will end up together, eventually. Their love is real and true—for Matthew still loves her, despite her Terrible Secret: a brief fling with a Turkish diplomat, which ende
d with him dying in her bed.
Although I’m not certain of all the technicalities, I think this means Mary’s private parts might now be haunted by the ghost of Mr. Kemal Pumak. I keep waiting for it to jealously go “WoooOOoooo” every time she looks at Matthew Crawley.
Alas—as Episode One finished, I was still waiting. There’s no dice as yet—but with another seven episodes to go, and Downton reliably demented, I’m pretty confident that I’ll hear Pumak’s muffled “WooOOOooo” by the end.
I went through a spell of reviewing Downton every single week—just because simply describing what was happening often made me senseless with laughter.
DOWNTON ABBEY REVIEW 2: SEX WILL BE HAD! SEX WILL BE HAD!
“Do the plots in Downton move too quickly?” is the question many are asking at the moment. And with good reason. After all, as we realized last week, the entire First World War has only taken five episodes of Downton. At this rate, Maggie Smith could be making imperious comments about the etiquette of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon (“But has he been introduced to the Clangers? Does he know their family?”) by Christmas.
But you know what? As long as you just strap yourself in—and maybe partake of a medicinal sherry beforehand—the rapid pacing is fine. It’s a hoot! Just think of an episode of Downton Abbey as a “Haunted House” style ride—such as you would find at a fair, or on a pier. You burst in through the double doors to find the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) kissing a widowed housemaid in the pantry, mount a gantry to view Ethel’s illegitimate baby in the pantry—then take in a final straight that includes an elopement, a miracle cure and a revelation of unrequited love before the final credits. Put your hands in the air, and scream if you wanna go faster! It’s only two quid, fun for aaaawl the family.
Of course, some fast plots are bigger than other fast plots. The megaplot that Downton currently revolves around is the state of Cousin Matthew’s (Dan Stevens) trousers. It is all going off in Cousin Matthew’s trousers, these days. That’s where all the narrative is being stored.
Cousin Matthew, you may recall, is the preternaturally beautiful blonde heir to Downton Abbey, who bravely went off to the hell of war to serve his King and country—only popping back to Downton half-a-dozen times for key concerts, balls, scenes where it just generally felt good to have him around, and angsty forbidden-love stare-offs with Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery).
At one point, Cousin Matthew popped back from the war halfway through Lady Mary singing If You Were the Only Boy in the World at a concert—then joined her in a loving duet for the last verse, before immediately going back to the war again. It’s the scene Vera Brittain never had the balls or insanity to write in A Testament of Youth—but, now, finally brought to life by Julian Fellowes in Downton. Hurrah! If the thinking remains as blue-sky as this, Season Three of Downton—set in the Depression—can have Bugsy Malone with a splurge-gun, or even—fuck it!—Scarlett O’Hara escaping a burning Atlanta in a horse and cart, with Miss Melly giving birth in the back. You might as well go for it, that’s what I say! Scream if you wanna go faster!
Anyway. Matthew’s trousers. In a war full of unspeakable atrocities, the Hun’s most beastly move has been an attack on Cousin Matthew’s—possibly literal, given his poshness—crown jewels. When he returned from the front in Episode Five, it was in a wheelchair—“an impotent cripple, smelling of sick,” as he called himself, clearly on a bit of a Downton downer.
For a few, amazing moments, it seemed as if Downton might have gone the whole hog, and written in a character who’d had his nads blown off in the heat of battle—only the second-ever drama to attempt this, after the BBC’s groundbreaking, testicle-exploding Lilies in 2007.
And, indeed, the first scene of last Sunday’s episode seemed to confirm this: the Earl of Downton watching solemnly as a car departed down the driveway, his somber expression suggesting that the vehicle contained Matthew’s balls on a tray, being taken off for a decent burial.
But—to infinite rejoicing—we found this was not the case. Not the case at all. Matthew was, in fact, trousioso intacta, as I’m sure the Latin would have it. The contents of his orangery were all present and correct—it was merely the “sexual reflex” that was missing. Or was it? Ten minutes later, sitting in his wheelchair, Matthew stared out into the middle distance.
“Bates,” he said to his valet. “If I were to feel a . . . tingling, what would that mean? The doctors keep saying it’s the memory of a tingling—but I keep feeling it.”
“If something is changing, it will make itself known,” Bates said, with all the wisdom of a man who’d had a broad country upbringing.
Although it sometimes felt like it, Downton was not all about Cousin Matthew’s trousers, of course. My favorite subplot involved the villainous Mrs. O’Brien and Thomas entering the post-war black market economy—and trying to rip off the Downton estate by selling hooky foodstuffs to Cook.
While initially keen on sourcing such luxe ingredients—“I’ve not seen this since before the war!” Cook exclaimed, holding up candied peel as if it were an unquestioning attitude of deference toward the upper classes—Cook found, on tasting the resultant cake, that Thomas had been sold a pup.
“This is plaster dust!” Cook shouting, spitting cake all over the floor, then getting all Watchdog on Thomas’s ass.
Thomas eventually returned to his warehouse full of now-unsellable, poisonous ingredients, and—furious—started to trash the lot. As he repeatedly punched a massive sack while shouting “NO!!!”, it occurred to me that this was the first time I had ever seen a man fighting “some flour”—and I gave thanks, yet again, to the mad majesty of Downton.
But, in the end, Sunday’s episode ended as it had begun: in Cousin Matthew’s trousers. Post-Tinglegate, we were all on high alert for further developments in Matthew’s pelvis—but were aware that the breakthrough he needed might come at a high cost. Previous cases of people in dramas “spontaneously” recovering from paraplegia seem to center around high drama—suddenly finding the power in their legs when a loved one is in danger, say, or when their own lives are at risk.
In the event, Matthew’s miracle recovery didn’t quite play out like that.
Joining Matthew in the drawing room, Lavinia—his current, wrongful fiancée—noticed something was seriously awry at Downton:
“Look!” she said, pointing to a table, with six cups and saucers on it. “They’ve forgotten to clear the tea things!”
Walking over to correct the servants’ heinous mistake, Lavinia was given fair warning by Matthew.
“It’s too heavy for you!” he said, as she picked up a tray.
But, too late! Lavinia had—inevitably—paid the price for the lower-orders’ carelessness: tripping over an ornately-embroidered footstool, and having to steady herself by putting her hand on the marble fireplace, next to the ormulu clock.
“Heavens! That was a near thing!” she exclaimed, breathlessly—before they both realized that this moment of peril had jolted Matthew out of his paralysis: he was now standing next to her, broken spine a thing of the past, future now rosily re-filling with the possibility of rumpy.
On discovering the happy news about his heir, the Earl of Grantham rushed around Downton insisting everyone come and see Matthew in the drawing room at once. Really, he appeared one whisky away from ringing the bells in Downton chapel and shouting, “SEX WILL BE HAD! SEX WILL BE HAD!” to the entire cast.
I’m sure the staff were subsequently instructed to bring out the special “Heir’s rediscovered sexual reflex” dinner service, as has been in the family for generations, in order that all of Downton might celebrate in the most Downton way it knows how—with the maximum of formality, oddness, and washing-up for the peasants.
We make a good team, Pete and I. Both journalists, both into carbohydrates, both agreed that the perfect babysitter for the children during the
summer holidays is a man of dubious qualifications and reputation touting some massive see-through hamster balls, in which you can place your children.
SUMMER IS AN EMERGENCY
“The thing about summer is, if you work and you’ve got kids, it’s an emergency,” my husband says. “A total emergency.”
Today is the worst day of August, so far: both of us are sitting next to a forty-foot paddling pool, on the seafront, in Brighton.
A cheerful, chainsmoking goblin from Manchester has set up some manner of novel amusement here: gigantic plastic “hamster balls,” into which children can be inserted, then launched onto the paddling pool. Our children have taken to this activity with all the enthusiasm of genuine hamsters. They keep tumbling past us, upside down, screaming, “THIS IS AWESOME, DUDE!” and flashing peace signs.
Sitting at the picnic tables we wave, shout things like, “You look totally deranged! We’re going to leave you here, and go home alone!”, then go back to typing, furiously. My husband is trying to write the definitive overview of UB40’s first, politically outraged, critically revered album. I am writing a stirring 4,000-word, pro-feminist refutation of waxing: both Brazilians, and Hollywoods.
Every so often, my husband stares at me blankly, and says “Dub.”
I stare back at him, equally blankly, and say “Pubes.”
The children wheel past in the background, screaming “COWABUNGA, MAN!”
Today—having run out of holiday allowance, two weeks into the summer holidays—this paddling pool is our office. An office with no ceiling, in which drizzle is falling onto our laptops. It’s far more exciting than it sounds, though: for with Brighton council being inexplicably heel-draggy about providing free power outlets on any part of the seafront, we also have an thrilling, against-the-clock element of trying to finish writing before our batteries conk out.