Wednesday 6 July 2011

The Admirable Fellowes


Judith Woods of the Daily Telegraph has a splendid article on Julian Kitchener-Fellowes, now sitting in his rightful Place as the Right Honourable Julian Alexander Baron Fellowes of West Stafford DL.

And a good egg he is, too. I thoroughly approve of, and rarely miss, his productions, or any broadcast with his good name thereon.

Lord Fellowes is possibly most famous for his screen adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.

"Fellowes, 61 – a clubbable, hearty, high church Tory in mandatory Viyella shirt and Harris tweed jacket – regrets coming across as such a churl and hopes to enter the forthcoming Downton Abbey fray in a more relaxed frame of mind. He understands now that audiences gripe because they feel intensely involved with and proprietorial towards Downton, even if they have a peculiar way of showing it.

The phenomenal viewing figures, which topped 11.6 million, made Downton both a critical and commercial triumph and ITV’s most successful costume drama since Brideshead Revisited. Yet Fellowes claims he was taken aback by the groundswell of enthusiasm. He describes himself as a lone Right-winger in the predominantly Leftie television industry, who was forcibly told on more than one occasion that Toff Television was infra dig.

The second series opens during the Great War. Downton has been converted to a convalescent home-cum-hospital for injured officers, run by the family physician Dr Clarkson.

Fellowes took up his seat in the Upper House earlier this year, sitting naturally on the Conservative benches, which is for the best, as his wistful evocations [and Timothy Belmont's] of the Empire and an age when Great Britain truly was Great, might not play so well on the other side of the chamber".

'Downton Abbey’ returns for a second series in the autumn.

1 comment :

Peregrine's Bird Blog said...

I believe he is coming to do a talk at the Lyric Theatre later in the year.