WE are all supposed to like nothing better than a happy ending, so can someone please explain how Eastenders beat Downtown Abbey in the battle for the Christmas television ratings.

As the doom mongers forecast a double dip recession like nothing the world has ever seen before, you would think people would prefer a little escapist light relief at Christmas. Far from it!

When it came to a choice between the BBC’s depressing soap opera, or the delicious upper crust saga of life above and below stairs, it was a woeful litany of domestic abuse, mental illness, vengeance run riot and a deadly house inferno that attracted the top score of 10.2 million viewers.

It never ceases to amaze me as what passes as entertainment.

Thanks heavens for Strictly Come Dancing hoisted by the evergreen Sir Bruce Forsyth and his nurse, Tess Daley; Dr Who on cracking form, specially commissioned new family dramas and Outnumbered.

The touching closing scene in the latter, with the Brockman family sat around a hospital bed happily singing along with grandpa who, loosing his faculties, sang song after song from his youth. The poor Brockmans, having missed their holiday flight because of a brace of Santas fighting in the street and a herd of cows in the Heathrow tunnel, had no choice but to join in and sing along.

It was classic British sitcom in the true Christmas tradition of the BBC.

However you chose to round off Christmas Day 2011, at least the 8.6 million who reputedly watched Downtown went to bed with a smile on their faces after shedding a tear or two. The finale to the second series, held over for six weeks – not that I was counting down the days – may have, as usual, been cheesy in parts and not entirely historically accurate but it was classic British costume drama of the highest quality. Even the stuffy Dowager Countess would have approved.

Now Lady Mary will not have to flee the country in shame with her reputation in tatters as the heir and her distant cousin, Matthew, having survived the entire duration of the First World War, miraculously overcome paralysis, impotency and the death of his fiancé from the forerunner of bird and swine flu, the deadly Spanish strain of the virus, finally did what Downtown fans have been urging him to since October 2010 – go down on bended knee and ask her ladyship to move a few notches up Burke’s Peerage by becoming his countess.

As fake snow fell (it was most probably filmed in high summer) and the orchestra moved to top gear and full crescendo, she accepted and they kissed. Ahh. Cue closing credits as the national grid prepared for a surge in demand from the millions of kettles about to be boiled.

Alas, it was not a happy ending for the innocent Bates, the downtrodden limping valet who, having been reprieved from an appointment with the hangman’s noose was left languishing for life behind bars. Rest assured, come series three in the autumn, the aristocratic Crawley family will do everything feasibly possible to prove his innocence and get him back where he belongs in the arms of his ladies- come housemaid bride, but far more importantly dressing and attending to every whim of the Earl of Grantham, and his trusty Labrador, Isis.

What is it about Downtown Abbey that has captured our and other nation’s imagination?

Creator and writer Julian Fellowes created a winner that epitomises everything that is was so blatantly and unfairly anachronistic about the British class system. Yet we lap it up week after week, forgiving the director for the odd faux pas shot of jet vapour trails in the sky, double yellow lines and a satellite dish or two.

We also overlook Fellowes’ poetic license in painting a rosier picture of the unequal master/servant relationship that the First World War tore asunder. There was a strict demarcation line between ‘upstairs and downstairs’ in a society where everyone knew his or her place and the ‘master’s’ word was law.

We may be charmed by the demure and cosseted, well-dressed ladies with servants to pander to their every need and polite courteous gentlemen dancing to their tune, but regardless of the wealth and privilege the fairer sex enjoyed in Edwardian England, they were – in terms of personal freedom and life choices – no better off than those who served them.

The Earl of Grantham’s gift to his butler, A History of the Royal Houses of Europe, was probably the 1920’s equivalent of Hello magazine.

As Downtown fans were escaping to more gentile times, modern day celebrities were shallowly ‘tweeting’ images of themselves worse for wear after imbibing too much champagne, in skimpy festive outfits that look cheap on young women let alone those the wrong side of 40.

The battle for the most vulgar and shallow display from a grossly overpaid celebrity was won hands down by Wayne Rooney and wife showing off to their fans, by tweeting – on in their case ‘twiting’ an image of their two-year son driving his £500 two-seater motorised quad bike. What’s betting they even had a stocking big enough to stuff it in, handmade by the chav fashionista’s designer label, Burberry.

As the Dowager Countess, Violet, Lady Grantham said in the Christmas special, with appropriately raised eyebrows and withering look: ‘When I think of what the last ten years have brought, God knows what we are in for now.’

A Happy New Year?