Apologies if we come over all Kelly Rowland for a moment, but Downton Abbey – welcome freakin’ back! Because Downton is back – not just on our TV screens, at a time of year most suited to country house sagas; but, more particularly, back to the kind of form it showed in Series 1.

Taking centre-stage for the first half of the episode is the trial of Mr Bates, above whose head falls the shadow of the hangman’s noose. Poor Mr Bates may just be the unluckiest character on ITV1 right now – yes, even more than the guy who commissioned Show Me The Funny.

Stoical of manner and too proud to allow himself so much as a lip quiver, Bates is required by writer Julian Fellowes to do his Sydney Carton heroics in the dock while possibly the worst character witnesses in history line up to quote back every incriminating word he’s ever said. Really – it’s like they’ve memorised the scripts or something.

Clearly, people’s grey cells were more reliable when they didn’t have Christmas telly. Without Doctor Who and The Gruffalo to watch, you’d probably be trained to remember this stuff while quaffing back laudanum and balancing books on your head. Or something.

But it doesn’t look good for Bates. And it’s testament to the addictiveness of the writing that, for a brief instant, when the Judge dons his black cap, you think: they’re really going to do this. They’re really going to kill Bates on Christmas Day. They’ll be killing Santa next!

In the event, Bates gets away with the mere bagatelle of life imprisonment. But it’s still an outrage. An outrage! Had this been screened at any other time of the year, there’d be legions of viewers prepared to go the full Deirdre Rachid by mounting a ‘Bates is Innocent’ campaign. The fact that this was screened at 9pm on Christmas Day, however, means that many of them are probably too sozzled to notice.

In any case, there are other more surprising developments in this episode – not least the fact that, for now at least, the Matthew/Lady Mary romance is resolved with a definite yes.

We’re not going to hang up the bunting yet, because, frankly, we’ve been here before and, Ouija board or no Ouija board, we know better than to predict sunshine and rainbows ahead. Besides which, this is a series which can go anywhere, do anything, and let’s forget the small matter of historical verisimilitude.

In two series so far, Julian Fellowes has single-handedly healed the lame, helped the partially sighted to see, and given starring roles to a tea tray, a bar of soap and an Ottoman pouffe [okay, technically a foot stool; but we were hoping to go for a Mr Pamuk gag].

We thought we’d got next series sussed: more Matthew and Mary heartbreak; more of Daisy berating herself for leading William on; more of Edith learning to let go of her inner bitch…. And then – confound the mountebank! – Julian Fellowes cocks a snook at our lame-ass predictions by playing all his cards at once! In two hours! At Christmas!

If it’s true that serial drama thrives on hatches, matches and despatches, then this ticked all the Christmas boxes. Lady Mary is matched; Sir Richard Carlisle is despatched. There’s even the promise of a Fenian grandchild for Sir Robert and Lady Cora.

After a second series which left us, like many viewers, alternately bewitched, bothered and bewildered, it’s notable that this seasonal offering returns to many of the plot strands and characters from Series 1 – regarding the whole business of the Great War as a ghastly and surreal interlude that, where Downton is concerned, has changed everything and nothing.

Characters we thought long gone, like Robert Bathurst’s Sir Anthony Strallan, make crowd-pleasing return appearances, and even Daisy the housemaid is allowed her moment of character development and ambition.

Best of all, there’s a viral gag in waiting for any YouTuber who wants to edit together the sequence of Hugh Bonneville chasing after the missing Isis with that clip of Fenton the dog bounding off in Richmond Park’.

Overall, it’s quite the Christmas treat, and, on this form, we sincerely hope the first of many. A merry Christmas to all of you at Downton! And a merry Christmas to all of you at home!

Aired at 9pm on Sunday 25th December 2011 on ITV1.

> Order the Christmas special on DVD on Amazon.

> Buy the Series 2 boxset on Amazon.

Did you enjoy the Christmas special? Let us know below…