It’s a week of good and bad news for Downton Abbey fans

THE fantastically successful worldwide drama Downton Abbey is finally coming to an end and will leave fans missing the programme which seems to have caught the imagination of people literally around the world.

Although filmed in the summer, a special BAFTA (the British equivalent of the Oscar for TV) salute to the programme was screened on the evening of December 21 with appearances from all of the cast members and tributes from such personalities as Sir Anthony Hopkins, Whoopi Goldberg and Julie Waters.

As if this wasn’t enough there will be a two hour special broadcast on ITV at 9.45pm Spanish time which covers the period July 1925 until New Year’s Eve of the same year. 

As Lady Grantham (played by Dame Maggie Smith) was not a young woman when the series started and the year was 1912, as she herself said, if the programme lasted much longer she would have become the oldest woman in Britain.

Like its very early predecessor Upstairs Downstairs, the programme which shows the class barriers that existed at the turn of the century and their very gradual decline, the show has been criticised for being a little too sentimental about the lives of the servants but at the end of the day, it is not a historical documentary but a story to entertain and it certainly did that.

For those who really miss the series, sets of stamps have been released by a number of African and West Indian countries depicting scenes from various episodes and there are rumours of either a possible movie or a prequel showing how Robert and Cora first met.