FIRE! Don’t panic, but there is a fire, fire, FIRE! raging in the middle of the night at Downton Abbey.
Pausing only to pull on his multi-tasselled and elaborately swagged silk dressing gown with its gold braid epaulettes and contrasting fringe, the front cord tied into a Windsor knot and his starched pyjamas just so, Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) thunders around the smoking corridors of his ancestral home as if his Turkish slippers were seven sizes too big.
Now and again he pauses to let the make-up department hose him down with soot, then he shouts a little bit more. Fire!
The silly womenfolk? They just run around screaming, their Marcel waves unfurling like damp fusilli pasta.
There is only one person he can call on in such a moment of crisis. Tom!
Tom, if you have forgotten, is Lord Grantham’s former IRA-supporting chauffeur-turned-journalist and putative arsonist Tom Branson (Allen Leech), who slept with his boss’s daughter Lady Sybil back in series two, got her pregnant and married her before she died during childbirth.
Instead of wanting to blow up the Crawley family, he now manages the estate. Of course he does.
“Tom, come with me! You know where the sand buckets are,” cries Lord Grantham, keen to establish matters of status and rank, even as the flames lick at his heels.
Oh joy of snobbish, asparagus-fork-waving joys. Downton Abbey is back. At first look, the fifth series appears to be just as glorious and gloriously silly as ever.
The popular period drama returns with an inferno in the great house. What secrets and whose bedroom trysts will the flames flush out?
Is there a possibility that the fire might do to Downton what the plane crash did for Emmerdale, and wipe out at least a quartet of key cast members? Or, like Bobby in Dallas, will Mr Bates (Brendan Coyle) wake up in his slipper bath and realise that the blaze was all a dream?
Viewers will have to wait to find out, but I can reveal that we return to Downton Abbey in the early months of 1924, just after Ramsay MacDonald has been made prime minister and formed his first Labour government.
Around the red velvet sofa in the library or by the lowly supper table below stairs, this fact does not go unremarked by the gang.
Indeed, key members of the cast keep bellowing the news to each other, just in case any dimmer viewers think they are talking about hamburgers or something.
Lord Grantham harrumphs about socialists in power, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) points out that the new PM is “the son of a crofter”, Carson the butler (Jim Carter) feels “a shaking of the ground I stand on”, while Anna the lady’s maid (Joanne Froggatt) thinks MacDonald will have real experience of the “harshness of life”.
As she is still employed as Lady Mary’s chief necklace taker-offer, clothes hanger-upper and folder of discarded stockings, it’s not something she is used to herself.
Elsewhere, note that it is Lord and Lady Grantham’s (Elizabeth McGovern) 34th wedding anniversary. Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) suggests to Mrs Patmore the cook (Lesley Nicol) that she might like to bake and ice a cake.
Maybe Lady Mary of Berry and Lord Paul Holly de Woode could then come and pass merit on said cake? Or am I mixing up my middle-class telly-viewing favourites?
Social change
As always, Mrs Patmore is busy squeezing lemons for a mayonnaise while assistant cook Daisy (Sophie McShera) is preparing salmon and wishing that she could do something called ‘rithmetik’. Amid the kitchen clamour, in a nest of empty egg shells, she despairs of her life but dreams of a better future.
Get the message? Big social change is coming to Downton Abbey, even though it is still white tie for dinner, complicated cutlery arrangements, plus full butler service and brimming silver teapots.
The last Christmas special ended with a cliffhanger of sorts when Carson and Mrs Hughes were seen sharing a moment of tenderness at the seaside. Has their relationship blossomed below stairs, in at least the geographical if not the physical sense?
Nothing is given away during the first of nine brand new episodes.
We will also have to wait for a first glimpse of the new dream casting team: Brookside stalwart Sue Johnston as the dowager countess’s maid and Richard E Grant as a charming art historian.
Meanwhile, all the old resentments and friendships simmer and flourish. Thomas the evil under-butler (Robert James-Collier) still clings to the shadows like a bloodless vampire, his every pantomime villain appearance heralded by sinister music.
That is one of the delights of Downton Abbey — there is never any confusion between the goodies and the baddies.
Dame Maggie Smith is still a pivotal character, an absolute scream as Violet, the plotting minx of a dowager countess. She is still causing upset and dropping her acid aphorism bombs, a number of which caused delighted guffaws of laughter from the preview audience
The acting is almost universally superb and the costumes are as gorgeous as ever. There are so many beads on one of Lady Mary’s evening dresses that she clanks through the library like Darth Vader.
That business with Matthew dying? She seems to have put that behind her and settled on a beau, but is he right one?
Meanwhile, unlucky-in-love Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) is swathed in the sadness of blue tweed for a misty morning ride on a bicycle. Is she pedalling straight into scandal and family ruination?
Only time will tell. Meanwhile she frets about the creepy Crawleys and their place in a fast-changing world.
“Aren’t we being very snobbish?” she wonders. Yes, darling, but that is why we love you so, so much.
In the UAE
Downton Abbey Season 5 will air on OSN First HD the same time as UK, that means one day after airing in UK, at 9pm. The premiere date is still to be confirmed.
