DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE

If you can remember the very first episode of the first series, Lady Mary Grantham (Michelle Dockery) was caught in a compromising situation with a ship that (literally) passed in the night. Well, she’s up to her old tricks in the latest– and final, for now  – episode. Newly divorced, she is shunned by London society and shocks the audience (you and me) by having a drunken one-night stand which is not likely to end at the altar. (Things are a bit different now with divorcees on the throne and throughout society, high and low. There are Ladies today who are seen as tramps, but trampiness is now more of an accolade than an obstacle.)

Restoring Mary’s position in London and the country seat is the central plank of the story, together with a general handing over of the reins. Daisy is taking over as cook as Mrs Patmore retires. Andy the valet is the new butler, with Carson finding a new role in the local community and Barrow enjoying life as movie-star Guy Dexter’s PA/lover. And his lordship (Hugh Bonneville) is trying to let go the running of Downton Abbey. If she stays unattached, Mary will be able to replicate Maggie Smith’s salty dowager duchess about forty-five years from now.

As in the previous movies, all our favourites are back. Everybody gets a piece of the action. Dame Maggie and Dan Stevens and Mary’s dead sister are all shoe-horned into a flashback. Noel Coward has a (slightly too large) guest role, brilliantly captured by Arty Froushan.

The Upstairs and Downstairs occupants of Downton are people we have taken to our hearts, and Julian Fellowes’s screenplay once again does them all proud. Despite the ominous title and all the bowings out, I think we can hope that there will be Downton: the Return in a few years; opening the house to day visitors is an obvious next step. As a superior soap-opera Downton is more splendid than Upstairs, Downstairs which clearly inspired it and very close to the perfection of Jewel in the Crown and Brideshead Revisited, the twin pinnacles of this kind of gem-quality entertainment. High praise to everybody involved.