The stars of British period drama Downton Abbey are set to swap their country estate for the red carpet this evening in London ahead of the release of its big-screen debut. Nearly four years since …
Gareth Neame: I’m always eager to find ideas that are expressly British that should travel and have global appeal. The English country house genre can only come from the UK. It’s iconic and durable; there have been so many iterations whether it’s an Agatha Christie whodunnit or a Jane Austen comedy of manners, there are so many different guises that the English country house genre has been in.
I commissioned Julian to write a script and pitched it to ITV. Even though it wasn’t at all what they were looking for, ITV and [Former Director of Television] Peter Fincham got it straight away and they knew Julian was the fellow to write it. That was very straightforward but the thing that wasn’t very straightforward was this was around 2008 and we were about to go into the biggest advertising recession in recent memory. ITV, in 2009, actually bought very little original drama.
We knew it was a hit the Monday morning after the first episode. We hit an opening number that we were absolutely delighted with. The second episode got about a 20% build on the first episode, which is absolutely unheard of. I would have expected a 15-20% drop off, which we would have still been perfectly happy with that but by going up it said to us that everyone came back and during the course of the first week they’d all told their friends about it.
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