My first and definitely last encounter with Downton Abbey on Sunday left me marvelling that anyone could keep a straight face when confronted by this preposterous presentation of upper-class life as it was never lived outside the fevered imagination of writer Julian Fellowes. I was goaded into watching it by a reader from Bampton (where some of this dross is shot) who wrote to the Editor questioning my right to slag it off without seeing it. Now that I have seen it, I realise I had been right all along to steer well clear.

The opening shot of a dog’s backside was an eloquent precursor — if you get my drift — of what was to follow. With a plot as unlikely as that of any soap opera and dialogue straight out of Mills & Boon, the drama shows — if this is the best that television can supply — just how far the medium has sunk.

“Edith, I can’t let you throw away your life like this!” said the Robert Bathurst character as he jilted his bride at the altar.

“We are going to be so terribly, terribly happy,” she insisted, in a vain attempt to see the ceremony through.

The Dowager Countess of Grantham knew better: “It’s over, my dear — don’t drag it out.”

“Vulgarity is no substitute for wit,” snapped Maggie Smith in an earlier tip from from the hatchet-faced aristocrat. No, madam, and neither is crotchety bile, which is all you seem able to offer. How sad that a great actress should expend her talents on piffle like this. All down to money, I guess.