Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
♪ ♪
They call Alastair "The Oracle"
because he seems to know about everything.
Alastair Bruce, a.k.a. The Oracle.
Yes, The Oracle.
It was very kind of the staff to call me "The Oracle."
He's brilliant.
Amazing.
A font of all knowledge.
They could have selected "The Nightmare."
The all-knowing, all-seeing one.
The constant midgie biting in your ear.
St. Alistair.
You can ask Alistair.
Any question you've got, he can answer.
He knows everything.
Everything!
He knows everything about everything.
You're just like, "Amazing!"
It's a bit spooky, actually.
There should be an app called "Ask Alistair."
(laughing)
I think we should get on to it.
I am a mosquito to a certain extent,
but the mosquito's task or The Oracle's purpose
is to try and get historical detail right.
The whole crew, and particularly the cast,
want the delivery of Downton to be special.
And I'm part of that process, and so I'm a sort of ally,
and I hope that I try and make the detail that I put across
interesting, worthwhile,
and have some clear narrative purpose.
Alistair is somebody who knows the era,
he knows the aristocratic conventions,
he knows the etiquette,
he knows about the attire that people would have worn,
the courtesy, the behavior.
There's a lot of research that goes into this,
as you can imagine.
Part of Alistair's job is to,
whenever we have a letter or a telegram,
Alistair sits down and dictates it
to a member of the art department,
who'd then produce it.
He does not miss a trick.
There was a scene we were shooting the other week
and I sort of...
I kind of came in with a modern gait, just a bit of a swagger,
you know, my feet were scuffing a bit,
and after the take had finished, he was straight on it.
He says, "No, you're an under butler.
"This is Mrs. Hughes you're talking to.
"You're walking in too sloppily;
you've got to be rigid and powerful."
He'll be like, "Well, it's about half past 10:00,
"so at that time of the day,
your character would be doing this,
"or perhaps you've just gone to get that
or you've just gone to get this,"
and you're like, "Amazing."
He's able to impress on me,
instill in me how a footman would behave.
All these people who were male had been in the First World War,
they were military,
so I need, with somebody like Ed,
to teach him the tools through which he then becomes
the footman that he has developed.
To start with, in terms of walking, I was very much...
Everywhere I walked, I would almost take on a march
because I would have been so used to day in and day out
walking and marching and very proud.
It's great fun, making them march around.
I taught him a little bit of drill,
I made sure that he stood up straight.
ED SPELEERS: And he instilled in my head
that all footmen were sort of the peacocks of the household.
They were the front of house,
so they are on show for the lord and lady of the house.
And what we've done with Downton Abbey is
we've tried to make sure that every detail
is as close as we can make it
in style, character and performance to the period.
I'll ask him the tiniest little thing, like, "Would I do this?"
"Would I pour their tea,
or would they pour their own tea?"
And you can just ask him any little thing
and he'll tell you
if you're doing something that's not right.
I think we've created something rather special
because what we've done is
we've actually given people a sense
that they're being legitimately transported
into a world that is so alien from today.
We did something recently
where he wanted the detail of a footman
sort of measuring out place names
and making sure that the chairs were sort of the exact distance,
the right distance away from the table.
So we do things like that, and I enjoy that side of it.
BRUCE: It is fascinating to see
how the performance of the aristocracy of the time
and the people who supported them worked,
and to see this brought to life in a drama
hopefully enables a historian like me
to encourage a whole new generation
to look at this period and do more research
and to discover the fascinating nature of how Britain,
its empire, its structures, its countryside, its people
and its society were changing.