The Seventies was a pivotal decade of change. America lost the war in Vietnam, women marched for equal rights, the hippie movement faded out and the world lost Elvis.

For the British aristocracy it was the nadir of their crumbling fortunes, a period ripe for the telling if you are Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, who is considering a fresh incarntation of UK's highest rating television period drama.

It might have been a throw away line but at a press screening of the first episode of Downton Abbey's sixth and final series, producer Liz Trubridge said she'd like to see the characters resurrected in the 1970s.

Executive producer Gareth Neame also suggested a storyline featuring Master George, son of Lady Mary and her late husband Matthew, as the Earl of Grantham, running the estate in the mid 1950s.

Death duties were ramped up in Britain after World War II, and many an impoverished aristocrat was forced to sell their estate to extract themselves from debt.

The sixth season is set in 1925 and hints at the looming straightened times, with the Earl of Grantham's neighbour forced to sell the estate's silver.

The idea of a movie has been talked about by Fellowes as a project he could come back to in ten years time. There were no firm plans, he said, but a lot of rich territory left to mine.

At the press launch in London he said the series had ended at the right time but quipped, "Life is a slightly open-ended story. You can't just kill the entire cast."

Fellowes agreed the 1970s would be an interesting era to revisit the aristocratic family.

"Until the end of the Seventies it was very uphill trying to keep the show on the road in these places," he was reported by The Independent as saying.

Asked whether she would be keen on a movie, Dame Maggie Smith who plays the arch Dowager Violet Crawley, says she was "just surprised that I got to the end," adding a movie "would be fun".

Asked what she would do next, the Oscar winner was reported as saying: "I'm going to be lying down. I believe for quite some time."

The night before the press briefing which featured many of the cast, the below-stairs servants shot their last scene.

"It's an incredibly emotional, moving scene in the very last episode," said Neume.

"It was very cleverly scheduled that they had that scene to do and then we clapped them all off the stage. I can tell you that quite a few tears were shed by grown men in the form of butlers and footmen that I never expected to see."