If Downton Abbey was McDonalds....

"SO BAD IT'S GOOD" ENOUGH TO EAT - YOUR BRAINS

Poor comfort-eating recessionites, we've got to wait till Christmas for our favourite, luxuriously engineered, salt-fat-sugar fix. The invidious thing about Downton Abbey’s success isn’t its undeniable entertainment value and popularity, or that it has restored UK Entertainment’s balance of trade with America, but that such smugly gilded, spinelessly plotted, lumpily scripted bathos has won awards for excellence in drama and writing. It's another discredit to the honours and prize-giving system which needs abolishing. Preposterous, predictable, derivative, sychophantic, aristophile...

better dressed but ideologically less defensible than the Royal Wedding, a ready mixed opiate for transatlantic austerity, it is an addictive E-substance, with the nutritional value of a fish-free lobster and salmon mousse. Long-term, it might damage our brains.

Even if you think it’s crap, you still enjoy a sneaky look, like only reading Hello! in waiting rooms, or having a bite of someone else’s chocolate profiterole pyramid cheesecake after saying you’re on a diet, but nobody gives Hello! the Pulitzer or the cheesecake a Healthy Eating award. Those of us who, like furtive gluttons, watch Downton knowing it's bad - and there are a lot of us - are the guiltiest of all. Irony that self-congratulates smells worse than rotten eggs.

If Downton Abbey was McDonalds, people would be sueing it for making them obese.

DOWN WITH ALL HONOURS.