It’s the juxtaposition of the lives of the aristocratic family against the lives of the servants that defines [Downton Abbey creator Julian] Fellowes’ work. Class is a defining and longstanding fascination for him. It began, he says, with his mother and father.

“My parents came from different backgrounds,” he tells [Fresh Air’s Dave] Davies. “My father’s was grander than my mother’s, so my mother had … to put up with the disapproval of my father’s relations. And … I saw it as a child when I didn’t really understand what was going on, and I saw it later as an adult when I did. … From that grew a kind of interest, in a way, of the unfairness of class, the fact that it is so arbitrary in its selection … and yet it shapes a life and creates entitlement.”

On rules

“We don’t really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty. But of course the good thing about rules is that you always know what you’re doing, you always know what you should wear, you always know where you’re supposed to be, when you’re supposed to get there, what you’re supposed to do when you do get there, and, you know, we’ve lost that kind of security.”

On working with Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey

“What I love about Maggie is that she has this extraordinary skill to bring many different aspects of a character into her delineation, but they never seem contradictory. She never turns into a different person. A lesser actor would, you know, find it difficult to be kind and cruel simultaneously, or superficial here but quite deep here. But she manages to synthesize all these elements into a believable woman and, of course, she’s very, very funny, so whatever you write for her always sounds much funnier than it was when you thought of it and, you know, all of those reasons make her very rewarding to write for.”