Jolly good Fellowes

Julian Fellowes was a mildly successful character actor from an atypically smart background when Robert Altman asked him to mine his intimate knowledge of the aristocracy for an above - and below - stairs view of 1930s Britain.

Gosford Park won him an Oscar and, while his is not exactly a rags to riches story, since then this erudite fiftysomething has put his new fame to good use, presenting TV shows, directing a film and writing the book for Richard Eyre's stage version of Mary Poppins.

The leap from servants to nannies may seem simple but Pamela Travers's magical governess is an awkward proposition: do you head back to the original books or plunder the much-loved but vastly different 1964 movie?

'In the film,' says Fellowes, 'Poppins arrives to solve the problems of a family that hasn't got any.

I preferred the original Travers notion of naughty children whose rages were a sign of a family not quite running on all four wheels. I wanted a story adults could connect with too.

'Being in a family is difficult. Mrs Banks is trying to be the ideal wife and mother and in the process she's lost who she is. I felt that most women and quite a few men would sympathise. Obviously a magic nanny helps but what's important is whether the Bankses' lives are recognisable. We don't have nannies - they didn't have computers - but we all know what it is to be worn out by trying to make the relationship with the people we love work.'

This is a long way from Julie Andrews and her spoonfuls of sugar, but then Mrs Banks in the film is a ditsy suffragette - hardly a figure who'll resonate with audiences today.

Fellowes, who is fascinated by social conditioning, understands this. 'Our generation sob over the plight of veal - 40 years earlier they would have chomped it without a qualm. Women now believe in sexual equality; in 1850 they'd have upheld the sacredness of femininity. Only a tiny number of our beliefs are

our own,' he says. One prejudice which irritates him is our paedophilia obsession. 'Nowadays it's the fashion to be suspicious - particularly of men who write for children. Of course, JM Barrie [Peter Pan's creator] wasn't a paedophile - what these men are in love with is not children but childhood.'

Just like Travers, suggests Fellowes: 'She was obsessed with her father, who died when she was a child. Having had an erratic girlhood and ending up in Australia, she invented the perfect English childhood.'