The star of Downton Abbey is of course the house

12 April 2012

It really does come down to location, location, location. The star of ITV's new hit drama Downton Abbey isn't Maggie Smith, or Hugh Bonneville, or even Julian Fellowes's deft script. It's the house itself.

Most of the 7.685 million viewers who tuned in on Sunday night weren't interested in a nuanced drama about the class system and country-house life, shortly before both were changed irrevocably by the First World War. They were waiting for the next gorgeous shot of imposing, foursquare Downton Abbey — actually Highclere Castle near Newbury — with its Bath stone battlements twinkling against the dawn.

In historical dramas, it's always about the house. Were we chiefly gripped by Evelyn Waugh's anguished Catholic writhings in either the 1981 TV series or the 2008 film of Brideshead Revisited? No, we were drooling over Castle Howard, which in both cases stood in for the magnificent titular abode of the Flyte family. It wasn't just Keira Knightley in a muddy frock that captivated us in Pride and Prejudice in 2005, but the handsome outsides of the stately homes Chatsworth and Basildon Park.

Period dramas are the ultimate in lifestyle porn. We get to fantasise at a safe remove about living in houses like Highclere or Castle Howard or Chatsworth. We can enjoy a pre-war, servant-served idyll without guilt over social inequity, and without confronting the harsh realities of pregnant chambermaids and the smell of unwashed footmen.

The houses themselves are made over on screen, digitally or otherwise, to show them to their best advantage. They are stripped of National Trust signs and tea-shop paraphernalia, of car parks and TV aerials. The smart-as-paint interiors are invariably shot elsewhere, usually in a studio. (I've been in the private parts — so to speak — of Highclere when I interviewed Lord Carnarvon. The curtains were in a terrible state.)

Above all, the lifestyle is made to look attractive. There's no sense of the cold rooms, the terrible food, or the muck of gaslight and coal fire (many characters in Downton Abbey are highly skeptical about the new-fangled electric power that is seeping into their lives in 1912).

There's rarely any sense of the sheer boredom of life without mod cons for those unsuited to mucky country life — although the 2008 film of Noël Coward's Easy Virtue, shot on location at lovely Flintham Hall, had a stab at it.

There's also no sense of the sheer impossibility, for anyone other than an oligarch, of living in a house like this today. Of heating and cleaning it. Of mending the roof. Of simply keeping track of the place: when I was at Highclere, Carnarvon's wife burst in announcing she'd just discovered a new room.

It's not just stately homes that feed our impossible dreams. I spent most of my boyhood yearning for the modernist Elrod cliff house in Palm Springs, with its flying saucer lines and curved swimming pool, which featured in Diamonds Are Forever. The longing was triggered all over again by the stunning glass house by the same architect, John Lautner, inhabited by Colin Firth's character in 2009's A Single Man. But modernist fantasies, like ideal stately homes, are best left to the screen. Just think of the window-cleaning bills

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