The Dowager Countess casts a very long shadow. Over the course of six series, five Christmas specials and two feature films, Maggie Smith’s iconic turn as the irascible Violet Crawley formed the stiff, perfectly postured spine of Julian Fellowes’ long-running ITV period drama. However, Violet’s mortal exit from the show at the end of 2022’s Downton Abbey: A New Era (“Stop that noise, I can't hear myself die!”) felt like a natural end point not just for her, but for the story as a whole. Smith herself died last year at the age of 89, but the upstairs/downstairs residents of the Abbey return here one more time for (another) fond farewell that begs the question as to whether you can possibly have a Downton Abbey without its endlessly quotable centrepiece.

The answer, surprisingly, is l

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