Old-school Sunday-night family viewing: ITV’s Belgravia reviewed

The world may be going to hell in a handcart but some things remain reassuringly unchanged: Julian Fellowes period dramas about feisty dowager duchesses, social climbing and snobbery, say. I like and admire Fellowes so I don’t want him to take this the wrong way. But when I say that his new series Belgravia (ITV) borrows from the same template he employed so successfully with Downton Abbey, and before that Gosford Park, and also in that series set on the Titanic that didn’t do quite so well, I’m not trying to suggest he’s a one-trick pony. More that he’s a canny chap who understands his market, has found the perfect formula and is damned if he’s not going to milk it for all it’s worth.

So, for example, in Belgravia — cunningly differentiated from Downton by the fact that it’s set in 1840s London rather than early 20th-century Berkshire — we meet an aristocratic battleaxe who entertainingly speaks her mind, suffers no fools and rails against the offensively newfangled ways of the times.