There is a moment in most people's lives when they realize that, somewhere along the line, they have been backing the wrong side. Communists in the west went through it in 1956, after Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. Those raised on Gone With The Wind grew up and figured out that, cripes, they'd been cheering for slavery every Christmas, and against the "dirty Yankees."
Now here is Downton Abbey, halfway through its fourth season, with Lady Mary Crawley emerging from grief and social change in the air, shattering assumptions and upsetting old orders. It is time to declare one's allegiances and, for many of us, years of living with the Crawleys have pointed them in a singular direction.
Most TV dramas are assumed to be liberal, because liberals gravitate towards jobs in TV. The recent and enjoyable flap in the British press about a left wing bias in Sherlock – triggered by this week's episode in which a Scandinavian version of Rupert Murdoch is briskly and approvingly executed by the hero – is just one example.
Look at Call the Midwife, proselytizing shamelessly for European socialized health care. And the soon to be aired UK import Vicious, in which Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi force yet more gay propaganda down the throats of a nation's exhausted heterosexuals. And what was The Wire if not five seasons-worth of excuses for criminal behaviour?
Downton by contrast has always been on the right. Tom the chauffeur had his Irish nationalist phase, which one understands to have been rather silly of him. The show favors a brand of Conservative paternalism embodied by Lord Grantham, who is a good man, and Mary, who, let's face it, is a proto-Thatcherite.
"His forebears have been tenants since the reign of George III," said her father mildly, a few episodes ago, when she urged him to evict a tenant farmer.
"Be that as it may," said Mary, "the rent's not been paid for ages …"
I enjoy Downton. It's silly and suspenseful, even at this stage when it looks expressly made for export: a moving vista of commemorative plates of the English countryside and the figurines arranged upon it.
It doesn't matter that at least half the cast seem to be reading from cue cards. In fact, it only adds to the fun trying to figure out who among Bates, Carson, Molesly and Anna is doing the least amount of acting, made up for, of course, by Maggie Smith, who is acting for all of them. (Like an Olympic athlete, Dame Maggie is a practitioner of the almost impossible to pull off quadruple-take, which there should be a term for but isn't.)
What's interesting is the extent to which, after four seasons, one is immersed in the values espoused by the show.
For example: it really is too bloody much to expect the Dowager Countess to call Branson, Tom. Once a chauffeur etc.
When Lord Gillingham's valet, Mr Green, invites Anna to call him by his own name, not his master's, she replies that Carson would be horrified and they follow the old ways at Downton. Anyone tempted to sympathize with Mr Green's point, is rebuked when he turns out to be a rapist.
And now, in this latest episode (on the US not UK schedule), here is Charles Blake, envoy of the Liberal prime minister and guest at Downton, where, he explains, he will be stationed while touring the grand old estates of England, engaged in some sort of viability study.
Lady Mary is horrified and there it is; the moment you find yourself thinking, good Lord! Why is the Lloyd George government harassing these poor people? What is this man's problem? Why can't the aristocracy be left unmolested to steward the great monuments of England through the 20th century? Give them a subsidy, for god's sake, it's national heritage!
Oh. Wait.
"Mr Lloyd George," says Charles Blake smugly, "is more concerned with feeding the population than rescuing the aristocracy." Lady Mary fairly hisses at him, and for a second, one is hard pressed not to side with her.
The writer, Julian Fellowes, does all this knowingly and with a degree of campness, of course, not least because Blake and Mary are clearly designed for each other and we will, presumably, all learn a valuable lesson about compromise in the end.
But one's sympathy for the Crawleys is so advanced at this stage, they could probably roast a villager over a bonfire and we'd think quite right, ungrateful serf had it coming.
Lloyd George paid for the creation of an early version of the welfare state in part by raising taxes on the aristocracy, starting with land taxes in 1909, continuing on through the First World War and in 1919, doubling death duties on estates worth more than £2mn, to 40%. This crippled a lot of aristocratic families and resulted in the selling off of many large estates.
A way of life came to an end, something Downton is nostalgic for in a way that is outlandish in the current TV landscape and, for left-wing fans of the show, constitutes a sort of political tourism.
I would, therefore, counsel right-wing critics of Sherlock to keep calm and enjoy the vacation from themselves, as those on the left do every week at Downton, now facing it's bleakest hour at the hands of the bureaucrats and the scourge of modernity. Lady Rose kisses a black jazz musician in the kitchen. Lady Grantham wants to buy a fridge. And Lady Edith gets a middle class boyfriend, who promptly goes missing in action.
That's the lower orders for you, I'm afraid. Thoroughly flighty.
