In Britain, where snobbery and inverted snobbery poison everything, there is a long history of intellectual suspicion of "the heritage industry". The masses who go to National Trust homes and watch Downton Abbey are fools, runs the argument, who allow the elite to indoctrinate them with a comforting view of the past that covers up misery and exploitation.

So, yes, I was prepared to accept that bigotries of my background had prevented me from appreciating Downton. I sat down to watch the second series, ready to be convinced that Fellowes was the leader of an avant-garde of the Right. He closed my open mind within an episode. To mention his work in the same breath as that of Waugh, Powell and Amis is to make a comparison that is so ridiculous it demolishes itself. There is no examination of the human condition; no character or situation that can linger in the mind.

At one point, Hugh Bonneville, as the Earl of Grantham, wails: "How can this be? My whole life gone over a cliff in the course of a single day." A single day? The earl was being too modest. The scenes in Downton change so quickly that lives go over cliffs in the course of a single minute. The feverish pace is evidence enough that Fellowes has taken the worst features of the culture he affects to despise and dressed them in evening gowns and dinner jackets.

In the golden age of television drama of the 1970s and 1980s, writers and directors wanted the time to allow characters to develop and dramatic tension to build. In its 1979 adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy the BBC did something no modern producer would dare contemplate. It emphasised the mystery by showing Alec Guinness sitting and thinking in complete silence.  The leisurely pace has now gone, in part because it is cheaper to cut fast from one interior scene to the next than film outdoors. In period dramas, outdoor filming is not only expensive but carries the additional risk of the camera catching satellite dishes, double yellow lines and modern conservatories on the back of Victorian houses — and the one true delight of watching Downton has been the sight of all the above in Edwardian England. But as the BBC and Guardian critic Mark Lawson has emphasised for years the main motivation for slicing and dicing drama is fear of the viewers reaching for the remote and switching to one of hundreds of rival channels. By stuffing the screen with dramatic climaxes every 90 seconds or so, directors stay the podgy hand of the couch potato.