TV Eye: Guilty pleasure viewing dressed in posh frocks

Dame Maggie Smith in 'Downton Abbey'. Photo / Supplied

Did anyone not watch Downton Abbey? Hasn't it been lovely? Real quality telly, and posh, too, with nice frocks, unless you are one of them below stairs.

Or a butler, for which you'd have to be qualified as a stuffed shirt. But even butlers have feelings, as we saw at the end of the first series when silly, stroppy Mary blew her chances with proud but provincial cousin Matthew. Mr Carson unstuffed his shirt and gave Lady Mary a hug. Wouldn't he have been for the chop?

Aah, but they're a kindly lot of toffs, are the Crawleys. They've thus far (there will be a second series) kept on: a blind cook, a butler who used to tread the boards in a comedy act and a lame valet who had been a drunk and in the clink.

I suppose when you have in the family, like a pet viper, the plain and conniving Lady Edith, drunk klepto valets are nothing. Edith had written to the Turkish ambassador to let him know that the Turkish diplomat, Mr Pamuk, had died in that slut, Lady Mary's bed. Mary's prospects are looking grim. She went up to London but didn't get many invitations. "After four seasons," said her aunt, "one is less a debutante than a survivor."

That wasn't a bad line. But best line of the series was: "What," and this was said in complete mystification, "is a weekend?" If you don't know who said that, you haven't been paying attention.

There have been some real stinkers, though. Gwen, the maid, to Lady Sybil, who is into rights for women and is trying to help Gwen achieve her dream of becoming a secretary: "We don't think our dreams are bound to come true because they ... never do."

Sybil: "Your dream is my dream now."

Now, this is the sort of thing that makes one shudder. I feel a bit snobby, in a way that might make even the Dowager Countess blush, about Downton Abbey.

I have an awful feeling it is the sort of television that stupid people think is brainy. (No, not you. Stupid people of the sort who watch, say, the Kardashians.)

It's very enjoyable and it has lovely frocks, but it's the telly equivalent of scoffing a box of cheap chocs made to look posh because they're wrapped in gold foil. I may be one of the very few people willing to admit they watch Downton Abbey and the Kardashians. (Occasionally, okay?)

The Kardashians live in large, nouveau riche mansions (modern L.A. Downton Abbeys, meant to shriek of your dough and status.) They spend all day getting dressed up and angsting about men, which seems to be their sole purpose in life. They are the elite, of their celebrity circle. You never see them open a book or clean a loo. Their lives are not so different, really, from those of the posh unmarried ladies of Downton Abbey.

But who'd be caught watching the Kardashians? It's slapper telly; it's cheap chocs stuff. I really must stop watching it and watch more brainy stuff about toffs in nice frocks.