Television Frances Wilson

anywhere else, maintaining a high standard of spoken-word services, embracing drama and poetry, plus orchestras and choirs, including the Proms.

We who appreciate having these things belong to a club. We listen to Radios 4 and 3, 4Extra and the World Service, Radio 2 (and, outside the BBC, Times Radio, LBC, Classic FM and stations peddling vintage pop) according to mood. When we discuss programmes, it’s usually about one of those. Sometimes, American public service programmes intrude: Think with Pinker, Radiolab, The Moth Radio Hour.

Perhaps we can imagine life without BBC television. But, unlike our podcastcrazy young, who flit about wearing ear-cans, we depend on timed fixtures such as The World at One, which means lunch, with a cabaret of hubris-filled bulletins from Downing Street’s Merrie England.

So if there were a radio fee per programme, how much per month would we happily pay? As much as our new fuel charges? Tough, isn’t it?

This year blew in with big themes. There was Amol Rajan’s excellent, head-spinning five-part discussion series Rethink Population. And Gabriel Gatehouse’s The Coming Storm. Then the culmination of Jon Ronson’s series Things Fell Apart, which exhumed warring cultures, discovering exactly when they began, and showing how things improve if adversaries confront one another and talk them through.

But did people really stop their cars and weep to hear the sobbing televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker shrilly apologising to her AIDS-afflicted (but long-surviving) priest victim (who would now go to heaven), as Ronson claimed? I found myself callously wondering what happened to the spiritual effects of Modernism.

Forced good cheer in the style of Butlins Redcoats, canned laughter and giggly presenters… Spare us these, please. But how cheering that The News Quiz, blessed with Partygate, had something to be funny about. Hugo Rifkind said, ‘I’m not sure we can call this a quiz unless Sue Gray tells us it is.’ Chairman Andy Zaltzman made buzzing sounds and uttered injured cries. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m busy sticking my fingers into an electrical socket. Nobody told me not to do it!’

And in a jocular rejoinder to criticisms of excess BBC wokery, Daliso Chaponda, on the licence-fee story, lamented, ‘So – it’s over for the BBC. My jobs [ie as token panellist of colour] will disappear. But this piccaninny with his watermelon smile has his AK-47 loaded!’ The Russells are moving in. Or rather the Russells are moving up. It’s 1882 and carts of gleaming statuary roll though a sheep-strewn Central Park to the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street.

Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), chatelaine of the sprawling Versailles, whose scaffolding has only just come down, is no one from nowhere, and her husband, George (Morgan Spector), is a railroad billionaire. Peeking through the net curtains of the brownstone over the road are the widowed Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and her spinster sister, Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon).

Agnes, whose people came over on the Mayflower, prefers things to be old. ‘We only receive the old people in this house,’ she instructs her socially innocent niece, Marian (Louisa Jacobson), who has moved to New York from the sticks. ‘Not the new. Never the new. The old people ruled until the new people invaded.’

Bertha, who likes things to be new, has ditched her old friends and is on the lookout for new ones – but will Mrs Van Rhijn call on Mrs Russell? The battle lines are drawn, the tension is high, the stakes are nothing less than the continuation of civilisation itself. ‘I am struggling to hold back the tide of vulgarians that threatens to engulf us,’ Agnes despairs. ‘I feel like King Canute.’

If HBO’s new mini-series The Gilded Age sounds like an American Downton Abbey, it’s because it comes from the same creative team. The Gilded Age was written by Julian Fellowes, produced by Gareth Neame and directed by Michael Engler, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Agnes van Rhijn, with her caustic asides, is the new Lady Violet, and Bertha Russell is what Cora Crawley would have been had she not married the Earl of Grantham (the Grantham estate is bankrolled, remember, on Cora’s dollars).

Life downstairs at the Russells’ is as busy as an ant colony, what with the French chef, the malignant lady’s maid, and the two dozen footmen in velvet pantaloons who are on full display when Bertha invites New York to her first ‘At Home’. Over the road, the Van Rhijns (who do not attend the soirée) get by with an upright English butler and a cook with a gambling problem.

Both households also, of course, have marriageable offspring, and in this sense the plot is less Downton than Bridgerton. Mrs Russell’s delicate daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), should have been launched a year ago but her mother can’t host a debutante’s ball until she can fill her new ballroom, and she can’t fill her new ballroom until her calling cards are acknowledged by ‘Mrs Stevens, Mrs Ruckerford, Mrs Jones, Mrs Vanderbilt, Mrs Schermerhorn and Mrs Astor, of course. We cannot succeed in this town without Mrs Astor’s approval – I know that much.’

Currently getting one guest into her house, let alone the Four Hundred (as Ward McAllister referred to Manhattan high society), is proving a problem. ‘This is what Dido felt when she was about to throw herself onto the flaming pyre,’ says Mrs Morris, dragged by her husband to supper chez Russell.

While Bertha Russell is either

Manhattan Downton: Bertha (Carrie Coon) and George (Morgan Spector) in The Gilded Age