TV Sketching: The Dowager Countess

Little Mansion on the Prairie

Julia and I have been sketching from TV shows, and a recent fave is Downton Abbey, starring the wonderful Maggie Smith. In my opinion, she steals every almost episode as the dowager Countess, Lady Grantham. Inflecting every line with subtle flaring of nostril, tilt of head or withering stare, that imbue her character with equal part haughty snottiness, dry humour, and wry wisdom as the scene requires. She is so much fun to watch. This sketch here was my attempt at a straight portrait with my left hand, but my cartoon roots betray me. Try as I might to deliver a faithful representation, my version of Maggie Smith ends up looking like a pug dog in a fur coat.

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Downton Abbey is a glorified soap opera about the privileged British aristocracy (written by the real-life Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, no less). So, why should an uncouth Australian like me care two hoots about Lady Rose’s utterly spiffing debutant Ball at Buckingham palace? Or whether Lady Mary can ever live down the beastly scandal of finding a dead Turk in her plush 4-poster bed?

A big part of the appeal for me is the beautiful recreation of period detail, which British TV shows do so convincingly. Leaving me with a nostalgia for a past that I would have most certainly been shut-out of, had I been there. This fascinated ambivalence is best represented in the show itself by Tom, the lefty Irish Chauffeur, who started out reviling the CrawIeys but is now one of them. Sort of.

TV Sketching: Downton Abbey

I grew-up wondering whether the impoverished Walton family, or the equally desperate Ingals family, could make enough to survive their next winter. Now, for better or worse, I watch each week to see the tribulations of the 1% Crawley family. Will Lord Grantham find enough money to run his 80 room country Mansion and his opulent London Townhouse? Can he keep his pampered family in hot-and-cold running servants, and multiple changes of posh evening wear and diamonds? “I say, frightfully desperate times, what?”

This soap opera about the two communities living side by side in an early 20th century British mansion– upper class aristocrats and their working class servants– may be an obvious choice for a country with a history of an ingrained class structure, such as England. But I think it’s interesting that American shows don’t do this more often.

In an American TV show about a legal firm we only follow the lawyers and never meet the people in the mailroom. If a show is set on a Starship, we will meet only the bridge officers and not the tech support dweebs on lower decks. If it is set in a hospital we only care about the doctors, and not the orderlies or the folks processing the stool samples in the lab. Come on America, where’s your sense of upstairs/downstairs 1%/99% camaraderie? The fantasy here in the USA is that it is a completely egalitarian society, but the not-so-simple reality is rarely examined on TV.

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As much as I enjoy the milieu of DOWNTON ABBEY, after several seasons the show is not as interesting to me as it once was. Simply because a status quo is maintained episode to episode and season to season. There’s always something just about to happen. Someone is about be accused of murder. Someone is about to be disgraced by scandal, and someone is about to leave the family. Inevitably, most of these things work out and are back to approximately where we’d started.

The series’ first season, set in 1912, started off strong, with boyfriends dying during covert sex. Their corpses secretly carried through the mansion by candlelight in dead of night. There were revelations about this servant or the next, and mini scandals always a-brewing with the aristocrats upstairs. And we were constantly warned that the modern world was about to change everything.

Then of course there was WW1 to deal with. But in hindsight, the only true drama in the entire series happened when a couple of the real life actors tired of the corsets they had to wear and the scripts they had to read, and decided to leave the show. Which forced the writers’ dramatic hand, and some characters had to actually die to be written out of the series.

DOWNTON ABBEY promised to be a chronicle of a time of great societal change in Britain. Strange then that so little of that real-life drama is in the show. The most recent season is set in 1924, and the only dramatic change in circumstances was the death of the dog in the title sequence.

I could hold on a few more seasons till WW2, just because I know that eventually Hitler can be relied upon to force some drama, the bloody trouble maker. But any time that you see Fascism as a solution to your problems, it’s time to re-examine your priorities.

30 thoughts on “TV Sketching: The Dowager Countess”

  1. I’d love to see a rendering of Bates standing atop a mound of bodies drenched in blood holding his cane and a hunting knife. Well anyway, it might make a nice companion piece to this Dowager portrait. The wrath of Bates!! :D

    Reply
  2. It IS fascinating because it is so relatable I guess. I mean, I can almost imagine myself as one of these people, even though I know I would have surely not have been. But what would my life have been if I were a lady’s maid or worked in a kitchen? These things are also interesting to me. Would I have had a life outside of work? I love thinking about these questions when I watch the show and always place myself in it. You are so right, Tom is a fantastic and so very necessary character. If he were not there, I might not feel so warm about them. He is the transition guy. Great show. I always feel so relaxed when I watch it.

    Reply
    • Lady Julia, So wonderful of you to grace us with your elegant presence. My, but those new diamonds, given to you by the Prince of Bohemia, are absolutely exquisite. Would you care for some Earl Grey? My new butler is an absolute genius with a teapot.

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