Schama on Fellowes

Simon Schama doesn’t like Downton Abbey.

“Downton serves up a steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery,” Schama claimed. “It’s a servile soap opera that an American public desperate for something, anything, to take its mind off the perplexities of the present, seems only too happy to down in great, grateful gulps.”

Schama, who presented his take on the Edwardian era in the BBC series A History Of Britain, added: “Nothing beats British television drama for servicing the instincts of cultural necrophilia. So the series is fabulously frocked, and acted, and overacted, and hyper-overacted by all the Usual Suspects in keeping with their allotted roles.”

Scratch yer eyes out. I quite like Downton. It’s mush. I know it’s mush but I do enjoy watching Maggie Smith sailing serenely through the script like a galleon under full sail, delivering her acerbic lines with delicious barbed haughtiness.

It’s drama. Drama isn’t real. It’s make believe. We don’t expect it to be real. Anyone who has or had relatives who were in service at the turn of the twentieth century will realise that it just wasn’t like that. We know this. Who cares? It’s fiction. Fiction ain’t the same as the real thing. Artistic licence and all that.

He went on to admit: “This unassuageable American craving for the British country house is bound to get on my nerves, having grown up in the 1950s and ’60s with a Jacobinical rage against the moth-eaten haughtiness of the toffs.”

So, Simon, it’s really just about your own prejudices, then.

The dramatist, once described as “the biggest snob in Britain”, has dismissed his critics as “socially insecure, left-wing nitpickers”.

Round one to Fellowes, I think.