DOWNTON ABBEY SEASON ONE SCRIPTS - Book review

 DOWNTON ABBEY

THE COMPLETE SCRIPTS – SEASON ONE

 

Creator and writer Julian Fellowes has produced the full shooting scripts of the first three seasons of the phenomenally successful TV series. 

This is the book of the first season.

In addition he has added scenes which had to be cut plus countless footnotes commenting on many aspects of the show.

Even if you haven’t seen the series, if you're a writer you could glean a great deal from reading this book’s 396 pages. Laid bare are how dramatists set scenes, cut to new scenes, define character through dialogue and create conflict.

If you’ve seen the show, then this book enriches your experience. You can hear the actors speaking the lines. And while a show is nothing without the writer, credit must be given to all the cast who bring their characters to life, endowing the words with depth and emotion.

Fellowes’s footnotes are very interesting from a social science and historical aspect, as well as being highly entertaining, enlightening and often humorous.

This Season One book contains scripts for Episodes 1 to 7 plus eight colour pages of stills, a cast list, and production credits.

I’m currently watching Season Two and then reading the second book in tandem.

Book review - Investigating Murdoch Mysteries

The official companion to the TV series, Murdoch Mysteries (2015) is a lavish reasonably priced hardback with dozens of colour photographs. Ideal for any fan to own. The authors Michelle Ricci and Mir Bahmanyar were given much assistance from the cast and crew; this book covers series 1 thru 8, so there will be spoilers. As usual, Titan Books gives us an excellent book in every respect.

There’s a foreword by the author of the books, Maureen Jennings, enjoying how her characters are being brought to life. The introduction is by Christina Jennings (no relation!), Executive Producer and Chairman & CEO of Shaftesbury films, explaining that some twelve years ago Maureen Jennings’ publisher sent her the books to read, and she decided to adapt three books as TV movies. Although the adaptations were faithful to the books, there was one exception; the invention of another character outside her comfort zone, just like Murdoch, so coroner Julia Ogden was created. The films were successful and the broadcaster was keen for a continuing series to be produced. It was decided to depart from the darker tone of the movies, ‘more Jules Verne, less Dickens’, and introduce steampunk and humour, with knowing nods to the future, and of course there would be romance. Happily, the team assembled provided all that, and more, from good writing, brilliant Victorian and Edwardian sets, to excellent acting.

There are fascinating insights into the characters, Victorian Toronto, and the inventions of the time depicted.  The Toronto police were formed in 1859. By the time of the start of the series (1895) the police have all-night patrols, a mounted unit for outlying areas and to control speeding horses! Bicycles for patrols were introduced in 1894, and as we know Murdoch was a keen cyclist. Up to the early 1890s, the police were also the main source of ‘social services’, until humane societies came on the scene. 

We are presented with blueprints of Police Station No.4 and the morgue. And Prime Minister Stephen Harper appeared as a desk sergeant. We’re given an insight into the music, too, which is an important aspect of the series, helping to create the mood. 

Yannick Bisson (Murdoch) does not, has never, and will never wear mascara or any eye makeup, we are told. Those distinctive eyelashes have been with him since he was born! It could have been a daunting prospect to audition for a character that had already appeared in three TV movies. However, executive producer Val Coons had declared he was looking for someone different, He read about three times to get the part – which he has definitely claimed as his own over eight series.

Considerable coverage is given to the costumes, which again have to reflect not only the period but the characters. The offices, and all the other sets, are painstakingly created to evoke that period feel.

All the main characters are covered in some depth – Julia Ogden, Constable George Crabtree, Inspector Thomas Brackenreid, and Doctor Emily Grace. Then we meet their friends and foes, too, all of whom grow in depth as the series moves forward, not least Chief Constable Percival Giles, tycoon James Pendrick, spymaster Terrence Meyers and arch-enemy James Gillies, among many others.

There’s an intriguing blueprint of Pendrick’s electric car, ‘The Pendrick Bullet’, which took four months to perfect instead of the usual two weeks for inventive props. And it worked, as shown, with the actors in the cab!

And of course we can’t forget the many historical figures who appear in the series: Prince Alfred, Alexander Graham Bell, Winston Churchill, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, Jack London, ‘Bat’ Masterson, Annie Oakley, Theodore Roosevelt, H.G. Wells, and many more fascinating cameos.

Lastly, we’re given a year-by-year account of the attraction, disappointments, travails and on-off courtship of William Murdoch and Julia Ogden.

Every year, the writing staff  meet a number of months before the next series goes into production and they develop stories and ideas. We’re given a fascinating overview of how a storyline comes together – the 100^th episode, in fact – and how the writers lay out a particular story with all the specifics – the beats – of what happen in each scene. They have to attend to logical progression, clues, red herrings, humorous interludes. The beat sheet is the guide; this becomes 15 pages of prose, scenes in paragraphs. It’s then read and revised and approved and then it becomes a 50-minute script.

As the back-cover blurb says, this is a treasure trove for fans of the series.

Book of the TV series - Miss Phryne Fisher Investigates

First in the Miss Fisher Mystery series of books by Kerry Greenwood, Miss Phryne Fisher Investigates was published in 1989. Its title was Cocaine Blues (though in the US it was called Death by Misadventure). Since then, over the years Miss Fisher has gained many readers from age 17 to 90. The popularity of the books has only increased since the airing of the TV series first in 2012 – now the third series is available on DVD  – starring Essie Davis, which is perfect casting.

To date, Kerry Greenwood has published twenty Miss Fisher novels, the latest being Murder and Mendelssohn (2013). The short story collection A Question of Death (2008) features Miss Fisher also and has been mined for the TV series. The first episode of season one retained the Cocaine Blues title.

Although Phryne Fisher’s family was poor prior to the First World War, all male heirs to a British peerage were killed in the conflict and her father inherited the title and moved to England with the family. The book begins in 1928 with Phryne, rich and bored, solving a jewel theft and then being asked to investigate a Colonel’s daughter who is married, living in Melbourne, Australia: they fear she is being poisoned by her husband. Phryne agrees and moves to the antipodes.

We soon learn that Phryne is not your normal aristocrat. After completing school, she ran away to France and worked with a women’s ambulance unit in the war. Now, she can fly a plane, and drives her own car (a Hispano-Suiza) and is quite comfortable wearing trousers. Her personality seems to match exactly that of her 4th century BC namesake; apparently, when born her father had chosen to christen her Psyche, ‘due to a long evening at the Club the night before, when he was called upon for her name, he had rummaged through the rags of a classical education and seized upon Phryne. So instead of Psyche the nymph, she was Phryne the courtesan.’ (p16)  

The story unfolds effortlessly, with light humour interspersed with a social conscience. Drug dealing – cocaine, obviously – and illegal abortion figure in this tale. Phryne is an emancipated woman, happy to love and leave men – she has no wish for commitment or children. A Russian dancer, Sasha, intrigues her while attending a soiree: ‘The guests were silenced by a painful mixture of Schoenberg and Russian folk-song, derived from musically obtuse Styrian peasants who had absorbed their atonality with their mother’s milk. The sound hurt; but it could not be ignored. Too much of it, Phryne was convinced, would curdle custard.’ (p77/78) Sasha is on a quest of his own, too, and she gets involved in more ways than one.

Her investigations inevitably bring her into the evil orbit of hoodlums: two men accost her – one, with a waxed moustache containing ‘rather more crumbs than fashion dictated…’ while the other possessed a ‘thin moustache like a smear of brown Windsor soup. Both had suggestive bulges in their pockets which told of either huge genitalia or trousered pistols. Phryne inclined to the handgun theory.’(p81)

Along the way, Phryne recruits Dot as her maid and confidante, and taxi drivers Cec and Bert as her spies and contacts. She briefly meets Detective Inspector Jack Robinson, who is blissfully unaware how Miss Fisher is going to turn his world upside down in future adventures.

An enjoyable crime caper with likeable characters and plenty of plot. As I came to the book after watching the TV series, I tend to hear the character voices from the show, which is praise to the scriptwriters who have captured the essence of the book(s).

[Puzzling why the UK publisher doesn’t use the TV series images on the covers; the publisher of the Murdoch murder mysteries had no such qualms: possibly a contractual issue.]

Essie Davis - Miss Fisher TV series - Wikipedia commons

FFB - Spectrum of a Forgotten Sun

Fifteenth in E.C. Tubb’s ‘Dumarest Saga’ is a splendid fast-paced science fiction novel.

Earl Dumarest covers a lot of ground – and space – in this one! Fighting as a mercenary on the planet Hoghan, he ends up on the losing side and is captured. However, his abilities are recognised and he is offered a way off the planet, if he can assist in a little bit of interplanetary smuggling. And one of the main looters is the Lady Dephine (not Delphine as shown in the blurb and on Amazon). Some sci-fi writers can’t write good female characters; Tubb can: ‘Life alone is never enough. Always there is more, for unless there is, we are no better than beasts in a field. Our senses were given us to use; our ambitions to be fulfilled. How well you understand, Earl.’

The pace never lets up: there’s betrayal, a deadly plague on the spaceship, landfall on Emijar, a planet controlled by strict codes of conduct where transgressors can expect to be challenged to fight to the death, and here too are the olcept, nasty critters that are hunted for trophies and attaining manhood. The dead are mummified and deified, though it’s no comfort to them: ‘Time enough for the chemicals to penetrate the tissue, to harden soft fibres and dissolve points of potential corruption. To seal the flesh in a film of plastic, perhaps, or to petrify it, to protect the body against the ravages of time. To produce monuments to the dead.’

And there’s a grand passion between Dephine and Earl. Love: ‘Sweetness and pain, the ineffable joy of affection and the haunting fear of loss. The vulnerability of total surrender. The willing discarding of all defences and the embracing of the unknown…’

Not forgetting another possible clue to the whereabouts of the long-lost planet Earth. ‘Stowing away as a boy… The captain allowed him to work his passage and kept him aboard until he died. When alone, the boy had moved on, ship after ship, world after world, always deeper and deeper towards the heart of the galaxy. To regions where even the very name of Earth had become a legend.’

And the story has a neat twist at the end, too.

As always, Tubb provides us with glimmers of prose that is almost poetry: ‘Her faith had been strong and she had died happy. Now she would drift for eternity or be drawn by gravitational attraction into a sun and disintegrate in a final puff of glory. A minute flame which would, perhaps, warm some future flower, grace some unknown sky.’ And then we’re brought down severely with: ‘Fanciful imagery which had no place in a ship which had become a living tomb.’

And Dumarest’s philosophy, usually within a single paragraph, helps paint a picture of the man: ‘… No human being, no matter how insignificant, can safely be demeaned. Always there is present the danger of restraints snapping, of self-control giving way beneath the impact of one insult too many. Of pride and the need to be an individual bursting out in a tide of relentless fury.’

 
Over the years commentators have wondered why the saga has never been taken up as a TV series. Particularly these days; the CGI wizards could do a great job. Perhaps it’s because TV series have moved away from the lone protagonist – now it seems a series involves a number of regular characters, it’s an ensemble piece, rather than a one-man show with guests.