The Abbey That Jumped the Shark by James Fenton

Our English stupidity is a point of pride for us. P.G. Wodehouse, whose spirit haunts the corridors of Downton, had the fundamental comic insight, when he made the manservant Jeeves well-read, cultivated, and sly, and his master Bertie Wooster genial, candid, and dim. So that, when Bertie occasionally rises to an apt Shakespearean adage—“And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”—he will always add the modest disclaimer: “Not mine—Jeeves’s.” The clever servant had been a stock figure in comedy way back in antiquity, but the master had never been so completely the servant’s creation as Bertie Wooster was.

Mr. Carson, the butler at Downton (Jim Carter), has a Jeevesian conservatism and sense of the decorums of country house life. Unfortunately, he is not blessed with the Jeevesian gift of total success at thwarting all comers. His master, the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), commits the fundamental error of choosing his former batman from the Boer War, John Bates (Brendan Coyle), as his valet. In doing so, he has allowed his heart to influence his head. Bates has a limp and is therefore—as the rivalrous servants almost unanimously believe—unsuitable for the job.

This business, by the way, of officers giving employment to their batmen, their personal military servants, in later civilian life—this is or was a well-known cover for homosexual attachments. One went into the army and formed a passionate liaison with a man from another class. The war over, one brought the batman home, under pretext of valeting requirements. And while we have as yet (at the end of the second season, with a third already promised) no proof of any impropriety in the relationship between Bates and the earl—no eve-of-battle indiscretion on the veldt, no cuddles on the High Karoo—nonetheless we ought to treat with suspicion the bare story that, in some unspecified way, Bates saved the earl’s life in what was referred to as the African War.