– Innuendo Filled Send Up of Downton –
by Jonathan Romney | Financial Times | December 11, 2025
You see what they did there? Fackham Hall — I believe, Your Grace — is what they refer to on the continent as a jeu de mots. Co-scripted by potty-mouthed comedian and ventriloquist’s dummy lookalike Jimmy Carr, this knockabout lark is a parody of the English stately home drama: after the likes of Scary Movie and Disaster Movie, here is Heritage Movie, boisterously spoofing Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey and Gosford Park. Think of it as The Naked Blunderbuss — heaven knows, it’s scattershot enough.
You might expect that, once we’re past the title, Fackham Hall had delighted us long enough. In fact, Carr and his co-writers, including TV regulars the Dawson Brothers, spin out the material to surprisingly durable effect, riffing jazzily on the genre’s familiar chords (what you might call tickling the Merchant Ivories). Alongside the plethora of Airplane!-style sight gags and oo-er-milady one-liners, the narrative smartly reworks the hoariest tropes of its target genre. At the country pile of the Davenports, nobly inbred over centuries (motto “Incestus Ad Infinitum”), one sister after another faces marriage to caddish cousin Archibald (Tom Felton). But sweet, fragrant, defiantly feminist Rose (Thomasin McKenzie) has fallen for dashing pickpocket Eric (Ben Radcliffe), now working below stairs, where a sign to servants reads “Unionising Causes Cancer”.
Director Jim O’Hanlon nicely sustains the mock decorum of a classy cast: McKenzie nonchalantly holds her own through a catalogue of indignities, Katherine Waterston and Damian Lewis are grandly clueless as her parents, and Anna Maxwell Martin gives a masterclass in snippy dourness as the Hall’s Scottish housekeeper. Carr himself appears as a vicar haplessly tripped up by his punctuation: Ronnie Barker would not have disapproved.
As a raunchier alternative in panto season, Fackham Hall should more than pass muster — though, might I suggest, it may be enhanced by the addition of intoxicating liquors.
Read the rest of the original article at Financial Times.