Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes is to write a new period drama for ITV, it was announced today.

Set in a country house in 1912, Downton Abbey will portray the lives of a wealthy Crawley family and the servants who work for them.

Fellowes won the Oscar for best original screenplay for the 2001 film Gosford Park, a complex thriller based around a murder at a shooting party in a stately home.

More recently, Fellowes wrote the screenplay for the critically-acclaimed movie The Young Victoria, starring Emily Blunt as the queen.

Downton Abbey will open with a 90-minute episode, followed by six hour-long episodes, and cast details are expected to be announced in the coming months.

Fellowes said: "It is no secret that I am fascinated by the extraordinary variety of people that occupied the great country houses.

"Where men and women worked alongside each other and lived in close proximity, but were separated in their dreams and aspirations by a distance that makes the moon seem close.

"Television drama often relies on a structure that will involve characters of different backgrounds, any hospital soap opera or detective series can give you that, but there is no narrative base that can provide members of every level of society, sleeping under a single roof, more believably than a great house before the First (World) War."