Downton, things will be great when you’re Downton

I resisted for the longest time.

Oh, yes, trusted cultural advisors – the kind who knew better than to recommend, say, Game of Thrones -  told me that I really should get with the program programme and start watching Downton Abbey.

Nevertheless, I resisted.

And then with the movie coming out, I decided that I needed to give it a look see.

Let the watching of the most high-tone soap opera in the history of broadcasting begin!

In the same way that men would say that the read Playboy for the articles, I would be lying if I said that I watched Downton for the costumes. But those costumes…

I am, of course, referring to the clothing worn by the upstairs folks – the Crawleys and their friends, relations, and non-friend/relation houseguests. (The downstairs brigade – maids, ladies’ maids, housekeeper, cook,cook’s helpers, butler, valet, first footman, second footman, chauffer – until he married up and got better things to wear - was outfitted in livery or drab.)

The clothing was ridiculously gorgeous. And, until the last season or two, the only one I ever saw wearing the same thing twice was Edith, the middle sister.

And there were an awful lot of changing of the clothing, given that you were more or less casual during the day – and the Crawleys idea of casual is, I assure you, not likely to be your idea of casual – and then dress for dinner. There’s a big breakthrough when Robert Crawley, Lord Grantham, started occasionally wearing black tie for dinner rather than white. Stuffed shirt all the way, but when black tie first appeared the reaction was what one might expect in a “no shirt/no shoes/no service” establishment if someone showed up in cutoffs and flipflops.

The women wear fabulous gowns to dinner, but, oddly, except for the grande dames over 60, all of those fabulous gowns are sleeveless. And no one wears a shawl. But we see nary a goosepimple on any of those arms, even though we all know that a pile like Downton – 300 rooms 100,000 square feet – was going to be downright chilly, even in the three-minute dead of a Yorkshire summer.

I don’t care how roarin’ the roarin’ fire was, there is no way to take the chill out of that place, unless you’re sitting in the hearth.

Not that I’ve spent a lot of time in great houses.

But for starters, I do live in a old house. Drafty and poorly insulated are the operative words attached to all that charm.

And I did spend a night or two hosteling in Scotland in what had been a great house that had fallen so low that it had become a youth hostel. In its fall from your grace, this mansion had been an RAF officer barracks during World War II, and the names of the officers were still stenciled on their doors. (Wonder how many of those poor boys survived.)

You never warm up in one of those places.

Aside from the clothing, what’s not to like – except some of the ludicrous plotlines.

Did they really have to haul out – and then drop without much resolution – the heir to Downton cousin who’d survived the Titanic only to show up as a burnt-beyond-recognition survivor of the World War I trenches, suffering from intermittent amnesia. This little plot hiccup would have made more sense if they’d at least given the fellow an upper crust British accent. But, no, they had to claim that he’d lost his accent because he’d spent a few years in Canada. Huh?

Then there’s the age-old beautiful young daughter who marries the chauffer plot twist.

Of course the chauffer was a dashing Irishman who was a political rebel, not just any old chauffer. (Or Irishman.)

I will cut this character, Tom, a lot of slack, as he was one of the few male characters I found in the least appealing.

The only other one I really liked was Edith’s lover, Michael Gregson. Who, of course, was married – a la the Paul Henreid character in Now Voyager – to a madwoman who he could never, ever in a million years divorce. Until he could, but that meant moving temporarily to Germany, where poor Michael Gregson was beaten to death by Nazi brown shirts just about the time of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch.

I was also rather fond of the man Edith eventually marries, Bertie Pelham.

Admittedly, I probably liked Edith’s men because I liked Edith, who once the beauteous Sybil – she of the marriage to the Irish chauffer – died in childbirth, became the kind, generous, spunky sister who forged a career for herself as a writer and magazine editor. (And yes, I did cry when Sybil died.)

Edith who, compared to her sisters Sybil and Mary, was a plain Jane, was the perfect foil for her gorgeous bitch of a sister Mary. I almost cheered when, late in the game, Edith called Mary out – supported by the Irish chauffer widower/brother-in-law who was so closely embraced by the Crawley can. (As if.)

Anyway, I found most of the upstairs men to be unattractive fops. But maybe that’s just downstairs me. (For the record, my great-grandfather Matthew Trainor was a stable boy at the Anglo-Irish big house in his village in Ireland. At least one of my Irish great-grandmothers was a maid when she came to the States. And my German grandmother, as a new immigrant, cleaned houses so the family could pull the money together to open a butcher shop. No question which end of the spectrum I would have been on.)

I did enjoy the Dowager mother, played by Maggie Smith, and her growing friendship with Mrs. Crawley – not to be confused with Lady Grantham (an American Lord Grantham married for her money) who was also a Mrs. Crawley if the high-faluters went by such a pedestrian name. I liked Lord Grantham’s sister, and watching Shirley Maclaine chew the scenery as Lady Grantham’s mother was a hoot.

But so many of the upstairs people were just plain odious.

Not that I was in love with all the downstairs folks, either. But most of the servants I liked well enough, especially the women. Mrs. Patmore, the cook. Daisy, her assistant. Mrs. Hughes, the housekeeper. Mrs. Baxter, a lady’s maid.

(For the record, I found Mr. and Mrs. Bates boring, even if they were both falsely-accused jailbirds.)

Anyway, when the last episode of the last season rolled around, I was sad to see Downton Abbey go.

I haven’t seen the Downton movie yet. Too busy watching season three of The Crown.

Rule Britannia soap operas!