“He’s hardly the King, is he? I’ve seen him coming out of a bank.”

I have to admit that I was profoundly underwhelmed by the prospect of Christmas telly this year. The big shows seemed to be The One Ronnie and Lucas and Walliams’s new show Come Fly With Me, and that really didn’t fill me with excitement. Luckily, as it turns out there have already been one or two diamonds among the rough.

It’s funny how Twitter can give you a false idea of what a show is going to be like. My stream suggested that this new Upstairs Downstairs was going to be a dull old thing, with turgid dialogue and deathly slow pace.

But I loved it.

Eileen Atkins, as master of the house Lord Hallam’s mother, is unsurprisingly brilliant. Wonderfully, she keeps a monkey that applauds her every morning,  and I would applaud her every morning too if I could — she is absolutely the best thing about this, just as she is pretty much the best thing about everything she appears in.

The script might be a little exposition-heavy, but I loved Heidi Thomas’s witty dialogue in Cranford, and I love it again here. Favourite line? “He’s hardly the King, is he? I’ve seen him coming out of a bank.”