Julian fellowes

Downton Abbey: A New Era is the second film spin-off from the TV series and, like the first, it doesn’t have to try especially hard if at all. It could be two hours of Mrs Hughes darning socks or two hours of Mrs Patmore concocting something disgusting (kidney soufflé?) or two hours of Lady Grantham requesting tea in bed and fans would still love it to the tune of whatever the last film made. (Millions.) That said, I have always had a bit of a soft spot for it. As the theme music starts up and we get that first sweeping vista of the estate, it feels reassuring and familiar, like putting on a pair of old slippers. On the other hand, old slippers can become highly embarrassing in time, so there is also that.

I am on record as being somewhere between weary and terrified of the threatened arrival of Downton Abbey 2 in our movie theaters imminently. But this is also tinged with sadness. When Julian Fellowes emerged with his screenplay for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park in 2001, it fizzed with wit and imagination. Now, he has seemingly become the go-to chronicler of English upper-class life, churning out increasingly nonsensical variants on the same story with greatly diminishing returns. So how does he fare when he turns his attention to American upper-class life? The new HBO series The Gilded Age attempts to answer this question. It primarily concerns two New York figures in the 1880s, who are schematically represented as "snobbish Old Money" and "arriviste New Money.

I love a British costume drama. My idea of a perfect Sunday afternoon film is something picturesque, with Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter and others looking alternately repressed and joyful, even as they exchange clenched platitudes about weather, money and train times. "The trains mean sex," someone who knows about these things told me once. "And so does money." "But what about the weather?" I asked. "Surely storms mean passion and sunshine means sex?" The expert looked at me as if I was mad. "The weather means the weather. Don’t forget, these things are filmed in Britain.

The world may be going to hell in a handcart but some things remain reassuringly unchanged: Julian Fellowes period dramas about feisty dowager duchesses, social climbing and snobbery, say. I like and admire Fellowes so I don’t want him to take this the wrong way. But when I say that his new series Belgravia (ITV) borrows from the same template he employed so successfully with Downton Abbey, and before that Gosford Park, and also in that series set on the Titanic that didn’t do quite so well, I’m not trying to suggest he’s a one-trick pony. More that he’s a canny chap who understands his market, has found the perfect formula and is damned if he’s not going to milk it for all it’s worth.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Tina Turner believed that she and Ike were the reincarnation of god-kings from ancient Egypt. That, she reasoned, was why they’d been reincarnated in Memphis, Tenn.; their souls would feel at home in a city that, like Memphis in ancient Egypt, was sited on a big river and noted for its artisanry. In a perversion of Buddhism by celebrity culture, people select past lives that are more interesting than their present ones. Plenty of people believe they used to be Napoleon Bonaparte, but when was the last time you met someone who boasts of having been an illiterate Corsican goat-herder who married his cousin?