Say what you like about those Downton characters, they have hidden depths. Mrs Hughes has read The Scarlet Letter; Jimmy knows a bit of Latin; Alfred is a closet chef, and, thanks to the recently revealed occupation of his grandfather, Branson has finally entered into his true vocation as a gentleman farmer cum estates manager. Even Edith isn’t just a resentful middle-child wallflower, but is a lady of letters. Quite literally in the case of her Series 1 correspondence concerning the late Mr Pamuk.

And now, Edith’s inclination to let it all hang out on the page has bagged herself an editor and love interest – actor Charles Edwards channelling the same old-school dishiness he brought to the part of Michael Palin in BBC4’s Holy Flying Circus.

Last week, noted TV critic, Carol Vorderman, defended Downton Abbey – or was it Coronation Street? – by observing, ‘Julian [Fellowes] wrote Downton based on Coronation Street.’ You can certainly see the similarities. The scene in this week’s episode, when former footman Thomas moved in on the sleeping Jimmy, had a distinct flavour of Todd Grimshaw/Nick Tilsley circa 2003. Utterly coy by the standards of 9pm ITV1 drama – although doubtless sufficiently strong to be excised by the Greek censors – this lacked the dramatic punchline of Jimmy actually reciprocating, which was, all told, a shame.

Thomas may have schemed his way through the last two series with an air of affronted petty pride, but his main problem is to have been born into the wrong class.  Were he by birth a toff, he could have cavorted his way through his boarding school years, getting up to all sorts of brotherly hi-jinks, protected by both privilege and the assurance that the Greeks – for all they have subsequently said on the matter – did it first. But Thomas, when you strip away the thwarted ambition, is that most 2012 of phenomena; a pleb.

O’Brien’s plot to discredit him as an ‘invert’, and a predatory one at that, is seriously icky. But anyone who can induce a miscarriage through a strategically placed bar of soap is clearly capable of anything. Previously, we’d had O’Brien down as a mere knitter at the guillotine, but these days, she’s content only to knit if she can be sewing the hangman’s noose.

Now it seems that, if Thomas is to escape a criminal conviction, it is to less familiar allies he must turn. The scene in which he explained his nature to Carson was more tender than any scenes of a manager bollocking a junior for sexual harassment, in 1920, deserve to be. If anyone exhibits the Sunday-night decency at the heart of Downton – as well as its tendency to splutter embarrassedly in the face of indecorousness – it’s Carson.

Even so, there was something a little 21st century about Thomas’s insistence that he is what it is. If there is one thing that has united the characters this series, it’s their uncanny precognitive ability to foretell a changing world order. Given the number of times sexual politics, and the necessary skills of working women, have been referenced, it has felt like we’ve only been one step away from hearing that, you know, I’m not entirely sure this damn business with Germany is over. So it was to Julian Fellowes’s restraint that Thomas didn’t allude to the whole future history of gay liberation in a few dialogue clunkers. ‘You see, Mr Carson, I might be a nancy to you. But in the future, there will be marches and such like for people such as me. And we will blow whistles and sing songs of Kylie.’

We never thought we’d be writing this two years ago, but we quite like Thomas these days, and can only hope that, if he does go to prison for sodomy, his experiences there leave the same lasting dramatic effect as Bates’s have – which is to say: precisely no effect at all, unless you count the couple of episodes where Bates seemed to lose his limp.  It may be mean-spirited to begrudge Bates his current cottage-viewing happiness; but surely it can’t be right that any drama is so uninterested in consequences?

Aired at 9pm on Sunday 28 October 2012 on ITV1.

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