Julian Fellowes's life after 'Downton'; Trump's celebrity candidacy; singer-songwriter Andy Shauf

He's really drawn from the celebrity character that he created on "The Apprentice" and has used that within his campaign in the same way that Arnold Schwarzenegger approached his campaign as "The Terminator." He loved using those lines. he loved capitalizing on that aspect of his career.

When he first ran in 2008, he went out of his way to distance himself actually from his comedy career. He was not funny on the campaign trail. He tried to really prove that he was a serious politician. So I think it's just two different ways right there of how a celebrity actually approaches politics when they actually get into an elected race.

For me and Andrew Lloyd Webber — two porky Englishmen beyond our sell-by date in many ways — to do a rock musical on Broadway just seemed sort of hilarious. Belgravia was this idea of publishing the book in a 19th Century way of releasing one chapter a week like they used to for Dickens and Thackeray, but in a 21st Century way because it's all connected to an app on the internet and you go on it and you learn about the houses they live in and the people they are and the different events of that period and so on. It's got a whole kind of computer element to it. Again that seemed like a million miles away from the more stately narrative of Downton. I suppose I was kind of stretching myself a bit.

On one level of course it's just fun that you can learn about this and this and this. One of the burdens of my song has always been to present people in different periods of history as real. To try and eliminate that sense one sometimes got at school that people living in the past were somehow different from us, living on a different planet and having different feelings and thoughts. Once you get into the 19th century, they are in essence us but with worse technology. Obviously there are cultural shifts, but their hearts and how they courted their wives and husbands, and what they felt about death -- this is still pretty constant. I like anything that makes history come alive just to make it clear these were real people.

When you say the world Titanic or you say the word Waterloo, it has a way of pegging the story and telling them in an economic way when it's happening. That in a way is a sort of short hand. The other thing I like to do is to just make references. In Downton, you've got the Teapot Dome scandal or the Marconi scandal and what I hope they do is stimulate a kind of interest in the period so that people, if they haven't got anything to do and are idling away half an hour, just write these words into their search engine. They'll think, oh my god this really happened? There really was a Teapot Dome scandal? It really did involve the American government? My lifelong quest is to make history come alive.

Of course in a way you're sad when you make these decisions, but we all felt that we wanted to leave while people were still reasonably sorry to see us go and not thrilled, you know? But also the young actors wanted to fly and set off in new directions and they'd given us six stroke seven years. I think it was reasonable enough, never in my sorrow have I ever thought we made the wrong decision. I'm very glad the numbers stayed up, the numbers at the very end were as high as any figures we ever got in the whole of the show. At the risk of starting a rabbit out of its hole, I think it's quite likely that there will be a film, and so we'll revisit them all at least one more time, but there won't be any more television, that's done. 

I think it would be a continuation of the same story. So that you have a kind of payoff for having watched all those series...I want to keep it within the age range, we cast the girls several years older than their parts, in case the show ran, and it did. So now they're almost the same age, at the very end I think Michelle [Dockery] was something like 31 and Mary was 33, so they're almost the same and I wouldn't want to make too great a divergence of that, I think it adds to the believability that the characters have, in a sense, grown old in pace with the show. 

When I was originally asked if I would write character sketches for Robert Altman for Gosford park, I ran out and I took every video there was out of the video library of his films. I gave myself a sort of Altman festival. I discovered that he loved this multi-story arch with short stories and long stories all woven up together. Because I wanted quite deliberately to write a script that when he read it, he would think, oh my god this is an Altman movie! This is a film I know how to make. I found, in the process, that I, like him, was very drawn to this form of multi-narrative. This new form was much more interesting, you had to concentrate, you couldn't leave the room. People say, don't call me now I'm watching West Wing. I wanted that. I wanted that feeling for Downton. Don't call me now! And so I went on with that structure for Downton and found it very rewarding.



I have two failsafes for what you're talking about. The first is that the first person to read it is my wife, Emma. She is very good at spotting when the story becomes boring. We haven't heard anything from Mrs. Patmore for too long. I would get those notes. Also, with 'find' on the computer, I would put in the character's name. Everyone. And I would go through the script and look at the page numbers. If you get one when it said 5, 18, 52 you realize they've been off screen for much too long. Then you go back and restructure it and put them back into that gap.

I think we only decided that two characters would die. One was the footman William and the other one was Lavinia who was going to be the fiancee of Matthew. The others were only people who wanted to leave. But particularly with Matthew, when he just inherited the estate, had the baby and was happily married and we're never going to see him again? That sounds like the Grim Reaper to me. So there's no way around that and I said to him will you come back next year and die in episode one? But he didn't want to do that for the show on Broadway.



It meant that the only way I could lose him without doing more funerals and memorials and sobbing was to kill him in the last shot of the season. The problem in Britain was that the last episode was on Christmas night. So there was everyone eating that one mince pie too many and sucking down a glass of port and suddenly - biff! Matthew's dead! I tell you, the letters I got after that -- I will never watch anything with your name on it again! But it wasn't my fault! Dan wanted to go.

I don't know about sometimes soon. As you know there's quite a long gestation and birthing process, but it is happening. I hope in 2017 they will have the chance to see what I made of New York in the 1880s which is a very interesting period of your history. There was this extraordinary collision of cultures where these vast fortunes that had come about during and after the Civil War in shipping, gas, mining, copper and railways above all.



They descended on New York where there was already an indigenous aristocracy mainly descended from the Dutch and British settlers. These two groups really fought it out for the domination of New York society and that seems to me rather a good background for another family saga. which is what it will be. It's a new experience for me because I'm writing about Americans for Americans. I love America actually and I'm very interested in American history, but it's testing. I try to keep busy as we all do. ​

My interest in the storytelling songs came from listening to Randy Newman. He's the only example I can think of for someone who does really well at being an inconsistent narrator all the time. Song to song he'll be like a girl at a funeral or a slave ship owner. I just got that kind of an idea from listening to his music.

This album started out not as a story album. A lot of the songs that were the first ones for the album that related to a party theme were just stories about my life. Probably the most personal song on the album is "Twist Your Ankle."



It's about a specific night in my life. It's kind of about a low point. Just the idea of being misunderstood or the outcome of being really honest in a moment and how that can feel when it backfires or someone just starts laughing at you. It's kind of one of those things where you don't want to talk about it, but you do. So the easiest thing for me was to just write a song about it. 

I think I'm a pretty shy person. I'm kind of nervous a lot so there's always a fear of looking dumb or being made fun of or something. 

I think you can relate more when things are just similar to how they actually happen in your life. I like watching movies where nothing happens except a character's inner struggles or something. In this album, I wanted to make it so that if someone wasn't paying attention to the lyrics, they might not even notice that it's a concept album or a story at all. It's just music.