TV Eye: From hotpots to hotbeds of spiffing good soap

Downton Abbey. Photo / Supplied

First, a fond farewell to Corrie's Betty and her hotpots. One of the very last of the great Corrie character actors, Betty Driver came from a music hall background - and it showed, in a good way. She was able to take a caricature (all the great soap characters are caricatures, despite the gritty realism of this one) and make her real. Was the real Betty anything like the character? We don't know. But it says a lot about her acting that we came to think she was probably just like her character - who can't imagine her at home, in her pinny, rustling up a hotpot or 10?

Julie Goodyear, who plays Bet Lynch, worked with her for 25 years and "never once a cross word", she said this week. You can't say better than that.

And welcome back to that other much-loved soap, Downton Abbey. It's terribly good isn't it? And it doesn't hang about. I almost had to reach for the smelling salts. Bang! We're in the thick of war where, at the end of the first episode, Thomas the cowardly footman, bravely and idiotically, held up his lighter so that the filthy Hun could shoot his hand. He wanted to go home.

Well, who could blame him? What a lot he'd been missing. Mr Bates, who must surely take the award for most ponderous acting ever, ponderously proposed to Anna. His ma had died and left him a lot of money. He and Anna could buy a small hotel and live together happily, if ponderously, ever after. Of course he told the Earl he wanted to marry Anna before he told her. Standards, you know.

How did you think that was going to turn out? Enter, stage left, the poisonous Mrs Bates. Remember her? She was the dratted wife daft Bates had gone to prison for (to cover up her thieving). Now she has wind of the money and of Anna, and of the Turkish diplomat who died in Lady Mary's boudoir. If Bates doesn't return to her, with his now fat wallet, she will go to the scandal sheets. To save the honour of the family, Bates tells Anna - and the Earl - that he's off, the very next day. The Earl growls and Anna weeps. Better off without him, I'd have thought. Imagine their sex life. Or rather, don't.

Lady Edith's learning to drive. "I do think I'm getting better, don't you?" she said to the chauffeur who had copped the job of teaching her. "Up to a point, m'lady," he said, no doubt cursing his luck for getting stuck with the chinless, charmless sister. (Is she the Gail of Downton Abbey?)

Carson's busy, busy, busy, keeping up standards. One has to. A war is on. He will defeat the Hun by keeping the silver polished. "Keeping up standards is the only way to show the Germans that they will not beat us in the end."

Quite right, too. If the Germans had heard there was unpolished silver at Downton Abbey, why, the entire course of history might well have been altered.

But, wait, there was much, much more. Matthew is engaged. We do not approve. Her name is Lavinia Swire and we were not surprised to know that, as Carson informed us, "she is not to be found in Burke's Peerage or Burke's Landed Gentry".

Her father is, like her fiance, a solicitor. This, sneered the dowager countess (Maggie Smith is still getting all the best lines), could come in jolly useful. "My, my. You're very well placed if you're ever in trouble with the law."

Never mind, it'll never last. Mary and Matthew are still so obviously smitten that if I were Lavinia I'd be really rather cross. But I suspect she's too drippy to kick up a fuss.

Yes, it's terribly good, somehow, despite managing to be sometimes really bad at the same time. It is all cliche and stereotype and cloying sentiment and manipulation. In other words, it's wonderfully addictive - much like that other beloved English soap, the one that gave us Betty.

- TImeOut