Downton & Roses

Finally Barrow Snogs the royal Butler

 Downtown Abbey has perhaps thirty characters of any note. Add to the mix four Royals, two far distant family members and a gaggle of half a dozen Royal aides and flunkies and you have forty people to juggle on screen.
A near impossible job to be done in just two tight hours I would have thought.....and my thoughts proved to be right as the story galloped away with itself as the likes of Mr Bates, Mrs Crawley, Mrs Hughes and Lord and Lady Grantham just stand around in the background and mutter a few hastily edited lines on screen.
Anna ( Joanne Froggatt) Branson ( Allen Leech) and Lady Violet ( A frail looking Maggie Smith still providing the best one liners) fare better with more screen time but it does feel all a bit of a rush as the movie throws a Royal Visit, pregnancy, an inheritance question, an assassination attempt! and  an Ealing Comedy-esque understairs mutiny into the mix before hinting at a gay romance for Thomas Barrow ( Robert James-Collier) after he gets caught in a Gay Nightclub in York ( more than I ever did when I lived there!)
As a piece of cinema , it's all a bit of a mess.....but having said this, the whole production is so infused with good humour and affection for its characters, I finally found myself enjoying it, especially the bits where Anna leads the Downton mutiny against the Royal servants and Smith's bravura handing-over-the-reins to the sullen Lady Mary in what turned out to be a rather moving finale as the whole upstairs cast waltz colourfully past the camera.

I got home later afternoon to a package delivered much earlier
Whoever sent me a lovely bunch of yellow roses

Thank you
Xx