The 'Downton Abbey' props department had to use chicken "disguised" as salmon on the set - because the real deal stank out the place.
The Downton Abbey props department had to use chicken 'disguised' as salmon on the set to avoid a foul smell
Hugh Bonneville - who portrayed Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, in the ITV period drama - has told how the show's bosses had a fishy problem one day when filming a big dining room scene, because the salmon started to "absolutely honk" as it had been left out all day under the bright lights needed for filming.
He said: "I remember the very first time we had one of those big, big dining room scenes, and we had this wonderful on-set … the person who did the food for the show.
"And all the menu cards that you see dotted around the table are all genuinely filled in and accurate, and it was a salmon something or other, which at eight in the morning is, you know, nice and fresh and everything.
"By 3pm ... the lights are a bit hot and, you know, and all the windows are blacked out, it absolutely honked, and, and of course no one really wanted to eat it anyway.
"So after that, anytime it said salmon on the menu cards, it was actually chicken in disguise, you know."
Hugh also told how the food department had to chop up asparagus and pretend they were beans when they couldn't work out whether earls would've used knives or their hands to chow down on the flowering plant species in the early 1900s.
He added to the 'Dish' podcast: "There was asparagus-gate and our on-set historical advisor, who was the fount of all knowledge, wasn't there that day.
"We were about to embark on this asparagus thing. I said, but hang on, in 1912/ 1913, did they use their fingers or did would they have used knives? What's the etiquette? We can't get it wrong.
"And so, there was lots of telephone calls and we couldn't find out, and so in the end we chopped them up and pretended they were beans."
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