From lethal sex to gore-soaked dinners: Downton Abbey’s best and worst bits | Downton Abbey

Put together for stiff higher lips to wobble. Clutch monogrammed hankies for period-appropriate eye-dabbing. After 15 years on our screens, the Downton Abbey saga is about to hop in its classic Rolls and drive off into the soft-focus sundown. The third and remaining movie spin-off, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, is launched this Friday, accompanied by a forelock-tugging farewell ITV documentary.For six collection, Downton bestrode the Sunday night time schedules like a Grade II-listed colossus. Author Julian Fellowes’s upstairs-downstairs creation adopted entitled aristos and their salt-of-the-earth servants at a fictional nation pile. Positive, the dialogue was clumsy, the plots soapy and the historic exposition clunked like a stately dwelling’s vintage radiators. But by some means, it didn’t matter.Downton was watched by an estimated 120 million individuals worldwide. It received three Golden Globes, 4 Baftas and a whopping 15 Emmys, changing into certainly one of British TV’s most profitable exports of all time. Movie sequels quickly swept into cinemas, knocking over popcorn buckets with their bustles and grossing virtually $300m (£222m) on the international field workplace.Now, just like the crumbling dream of aristocratic England it portrayed, it’s coming to an finish. However what had been the haw-hawing highlights? And what had been the tweed-clad low factors? Include us as we ask our underpaid however grateful butler to go the perfect claret and press rewind …The 5 bestMatthew Crawley’s smashing ChristmasAcross three collection of sherry-sipping, pearl-clutching and low-stakes plotting, Downton had established itself as one of many cosiest treats on TV. So it got here as a sucker punch at Christmas 2012 when Fellowes made the nation choke on its High quality Avenue. Mere hours after spouse, Woman Mary (Michelle Dockery), had given beginning to a son and inheritor, Matthew and his floppy fringe had been devastatingly killed off in a automotive crash. As his classic motor lay the other way up in a ditch, the digital camera festively lingered on his lifeless eyes and pooling blood. Roll credit. Actor Dan Stevens went on to huge issues in Hollywood, however the Scrooge-like plot twist turned referred to as “How Downton Ruined Christmas”.Every little thing the Dowager Countess ever mentioned“Don’t be defeatist, expensive, it’s very center class.” Downton’s defining character was tart-tongued diva Violet Crawley, delivered to owl-like life by the late Maggie Smith. Her harmless inquiry of “What’s a weekend?” will go down in toff TV historical past. The pampered posho’s haughty face-pulling and scrumptious line supply had been a weekly spotlight. Her pince-nez would pop off at a cutlery-based crime. Her nostrils flared in horror at some ghastly commoner’s etiquette error. Even her final phrases had been positively Wildean, telling a blubbing girl’s maid at her bedside: “Cease that noise, I can’t hear myself die.”Woman Mary’s Turkish delightYou’d assume actor Theo James – him of White Lotus douchebag pedigree – might deal with himself in a intercourse scene, however 15 years in the past, the virgin Mary fairly actually shagged him to demise. James popped up in collection one as Turkish diplomat Kemal Pamuk, who stopped off at Downton after a peace convention. Throughout a scandalous night time of ardour with the Earl of Grantham’s eldest daughter, Pamuk dropped useless from a coronary heart assault. A spot of nocturnal corpse removing helped hush it up. Fellowes has admitted that the plotline was pilfered from actual life. “That was utterly true,” he mentioned. “A visitor had smuggled in a person who then had a coronary heart assault. They carried this useless physique the size of certainly one of England’s nice homes, bought him into his proper mattress and the story by no means bought out.” What a strategy to go. Downton legend has it that the ghost of Mr Pamuk nonetheless haunts the again passage.Romance under stairsThose toffs upstairs are all very properly, but it surely’s the plucky plebs who offered the present’s coronary heart and soul. Downton devotees grinned ear to ear when romance blossomed between honourable valet Mr Bates (Brendan Coyle) and dependable girl’s maid Anna (Joanne Froggatt). The couple had all method of black-clad distress heaped upon them – homicide trials, rapes, miscarriages, gratuitous limps – however lower-class love conquered all. Their cockle-warming arc was surpassed solely by the Stays of the Day-style slow-burn courtship between butler Carson (Jim Carter) and housekeeper Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan). This was additional improved by a comical prenuptial subplot the place Mrs Hughes roped in prepare dinner Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol) to seek out out if Carson anticipated their union to be consummated. Cue a barrage of ye olde euphemisms: “Have you ever totally thought-about each facet of marriage? Will she be anticipated to carry out all wifely duties? Do you would like her to share your, er, lifestyle?” Carson’s eyebrows raised to this point they hovered close to the chandeliers.Brendan Coyle and Joanne Froggatt movie a romantic encounter as John Bates and Anna Smith. {Photograph}: {Photograph} Nick Briggs. +44(0)20/movie firm handoutWhen Sybil made us snivelWhen he wrote the script the place the youngest Crawley sister died in childbirth, Fellowes confessed that he was “completely streaming with tears’’. You and us each, babes. Having boldly crossed the category divide to marry Irish chauffeur Tom “no relation to Richard” Branson (Allen Leech), husky-voiced, gold-hearted Woman Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay) gave beginning to a child woman. Nonetheless, her bumptious father and his fancy London physician ignored the warnings of village doctor Dr Clarkson, refusing to take her to hospital. Sybil promptly died from the problems of pre-eclampsia. Her heartbroken husband named their daughter Sybbie in tribute. Cease it, you’ll set me off once more.The 5 worstWalk, don’t walkShot within the backbone and despatched dwelling wounded from the primary world battle, that good Matthew Crawley was advised that he’d be paralysed for all times from the waist down and unable to father youngsters. Gasp! What did this imply for expensive previous Downton’s unsure future? Worry not, ye of little religion. It was a mere two episodes earlier than Matthew miraculously regained feeling in his legs and instinctively leapt from his wheelchair to assist Lavinia Swire (Zoe Boyle) when she tripped over and dropped a tea tray, gallantly catching her as she fell. They need to flip it right into a NHS therapy.That canine’s derriere on the opening titlesPoor Isis the labrador. Not solely did her title turn into deeply awkward in the course of the rise of the Islamic State terrorist organisation. She was additionally subjected to the doggy indignity of a lingering shot of her bottom on the opening credit. Because the Earl of Grantham strode throughout the rolling grounds in direction of his stately dwelling, his hound trotted alongside, bum oscillating out and in of view as her tail wagged. Isis was finally killed off and changed by an Andrex pet known as Teo, however out of respect, her fluffy derriere remained on the credit. It’s what she would have wished.Spratt’s entertainmentLady Edith’s foremost operate was to be unfortunate in love and reside within the flapper girl-shaped shadow of elder sister Mary. By collection 5, nonetheless, she’d turn into a profession lady. Type of. As Edith edited a new-fangled journal in “that” London, society was abuzz with hypothesis concerning the identification of its nameless agony aunt Cassandra – a kind of proto-Woman Whistledown from Bridgerton. Who lay behind this mysterious nom de plume? In a camply implausible growth, step ahead the Dowager Countess’s bumbling butler Septimus Spratt (Jeremy Swift) – a kind of male Mrs General with a face like a moist weekend in Whitby. Who else? It’s a surprise Spratt discovered time for moonlighting, what along with his interminable feud with lippy girl’s maid Mrs Denker (Sue Johnston).O’Brien will get her ladyship in a latherAlong with scheming footman Thomas Barrow, evil girl’s maid Miss O’Brien (Siobhan Finneran) was the hiss-boo panto villain of the early collection. Her most dastardly trick was the literal stuff of cleaning soap opera. Underneath the misapprehension that she was about to be sacked, O’Brien slyly planted a moist bar of carbolic cleaning soap on the ground beside her mistress’s bathtub. Pregnant Cora Crawley (Elizabeth McGovern) slipped on it and miscarried. O’Brien, in her defence, did seem stuffed with regret for a scene or two, earlier than regular devious service was resumed. Sadly, it’s additionally the final mildly fascinating storyline that Cora bought.Spew BonnevilleDinnertime gore-fests are extra historically related to Sport of Thrones. However something Westeros can do, the landed gentry can do extra ludicrously. There had been clumsy foreshadowing of Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) having abdomen issues, with the peaky patriarch grumbling about “a little bit of indigestion”. No one anticipated a scene worthy of The Exorcist. Throughout a dinner for visiting well being minister (and future PM) Neville Chamberlain, the Earl’s ulcer burst and he projectile-vomited blood everywhere in the dinner desk and assembled visitors. Whereas the Earl was carted off for emergency surgical procedure, diners daintily wiped scarlet spatter off their pearls and tiaras, earlier than sending for one more pot of Mrs Patmore’s espresso. Has Vanish stain remover been invented but, my lordship?