Full credit to Downton Abbey – not every drama can follow a game-changing death in the family with a scene which turns 1920s’ attitudes to prostitution into the stuff of drawing room comedy. It’s precisely the sort of campness which endears the programme to its many followers: a moment of almost conflict as characters get very cross with each other before the perfect punchline of an arch quip from Dame Maggie. In this instance, Dame Maggie had something to say about the appropriateness of maid Ethel’s costume for her former career as a prostitute, the Dowager Countess proving herself remarkably well-informed about the role of costume play in gentlemen’s liaisons.

Following on from her candid revelation, earlier in the episode, that she knew something of the pain of a broken heart, for a brief moment, this suggested the existence of a murky former life for the Dowager Countess – one in which she had taken her no-nonsense approach to the heart into the bedroom, mounting her lovers like Frankel and claiming fourteen victories in a row. It attested to the liberalism which we all know is slowly thawing the heart of the Dowager Countess. But unfortunately, it also attested to the chocolate box cosiness with which writer, Julian Fellowes, packages up even his most kitchen sink of storylines. The demands of Sunday night telly being what they are, no one is allowed to stay angry for too long, and no attitudes are allowed to be too unpalatable for the modern audience.

Would-be cook Ethel – the former maid-turned single mother-turned prostitute – has followed a career path that is halfway between Catherine Cookson and Hollyoaks. She is, we are reminded, a figure of ruin and scorn. But more than this, she is a double standard: a chance for the characters to pause and reflect portentously on the changing roles of women – on those values, as Cora puts it, ‘that have no relevance any more’ – while, at the same time, the drama which over-eggs itself around them milks the scenario for as much nudge-nudge comedy as it can.

Whether it’s Dame Maggie’s quips, or Carson’s unwitting visualisation of Mrs Patmore spending ‘her time frolicking with prostitutes’, it’s strictly the cuddly face of patriarchy and misogyny. And while, yes, the joke may be against those who are most censorious, and therefore look most ludicrous, somehow it’s not enough. It’s not enough to play with the theme of women’s suffrage yet have every threat to womanhood except the most primal, death in childbirth, washed away with the equivalent of that Torchwood memory drug when no one could remember that they’d ever met an alien.

Been jilted at the altar and fearing for your financial, social and emotional security? No worries – a friendly newspaper editor will turn you into His Girl Friday. Widowed following the Great War and staring at forty years of service ahead of you? No worries – you can become a lady farmer with a great big inheritance to boot.

Daisy’s latest storyline is only one among many magic wands that are routinely deployed in this drama to re-set the action every other week. Moreover, as in so many of those other storylines, it carries with it the echo of a more interesting sub-plot which we are not getting: one in which the feelings of Daisy’s late husband’s father, Mr Mason, are not strictly paternal and may, in fact, be predatory. It’s the promise of Mary Wollstonecraft and the delivery of Mills and Boon. And while it doesn’t make the drama any less entertaining, it does, even for those of us who love it, make it increasingly frustrating.

Aired at 9pm on Sunday 21st October 2012 on ITV1.

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