"I was there twenty minutes before Rex. If I had to spend an evening with him, it should, at any rate, be in my own way."

In the 1981 dramatization of Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945) Charles Ryder orders a sumptuous dinner at Paillard's, a well-known upscale restaurant in Paris, for his tedious evening with Rex Mottram. The scene is set in 1924 and Paillard's closed its doors in 1930, but the art director chose to use fairly pedestrian restaurant ware for the table, using a distinctive green wreath pattern with repetitive festoons around the plate. This would have been British antique crockery when the book was dramatized, not an upscale setting but something period appropriate for the scene.

A more surprising choice was the inclusion of Mason's 'Mandalay' ironstone in the breakfast room at 221 Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett) and Dr. Watson (Edward Hardwicke) spent their mornings planning their cases. Set in the 1880s in London, Mason's 'Mandalay' was a pretty choice for Mrs. Hudson's table setting but it wasn't era-appropriate, since the 'Mandalay' setting was first available in the 1920s. However Mason's was a preeminent ironstone manufacturer in England from 1805 and their early patterns included Imari-style Japanese ware, which the 'Mandalay' pattern emulates. It's a good stand-in for the real thing.

Sharp eyed viewers of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice series will spot newlyweds Mr. and Mrs. Collins using the same setting at their table at Hunsford Parsonage near Rosings Park. This story occurs in the early 1800s well before this design became available, but again it's a good substitute for the Mason's patterns of the time.

Appropriate to the period, the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey, Lady Violet Crawley, uses Mason's 'Mandalay' as her primary dinnerware. Clearly the BBC and other television producers of the last forty years have taken advantage of this set, which reappears like an old friend whenever needed.