'Downton Abbey': 10 highlights from the new book

A new book about "Downton Abbey," released before the season 2 premiere on Jan. 8, provides insight into the show.

9. Continuity and keeping warm

Anonymous/HONS/PBS/AP

When it came to filming the servants' scenes, continuity was hard to maintain because Thomas the footman might be filmed leaving the kitchen with a plate on one day – and then two weeks later he was filmed entering. When actors playing the maids or the footmen did film scenes at Highclere Castle (which occurred mostly for those scenes in which they were waiting on the Crawley family), the actors say the castle's position on a hill made it chilly and the female servants wore legwarmers underneath their skirts.

9 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.