Is Downton’s terrible Thomas plotting his own spin-off show? CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last weekend's TV

By Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail

Published: 20:47 EST, 27 September 2015 | Updated: 07:31 EST, 28 September 2015

Plotting: Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier) used to be able to manipulate everyone in the stately home but now nobody even pretends to like him

Downton Abbey

Rating:

Cider with Rosie

Rating:

Clever Barrow. Just two episodes into the final series of Downton Abbey (ITV) and he’s plotting how to turn the demise of the show into the dawn of his own superstardom.

We’re used to seeing under-butler Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier) scheme and conspire, blackmailing the ladies’ maids and seducing the footmen. He’s pure poison in a penguin suit.

But the skids have been under him since Cora’s maid Baxter (Raquel Cassidy) refused to be his spy upstairs in m’lady’s chamber.

Barrow used to be able to manipulate everyone in the stately home but now, no matter what he does — rescue Lady Edith from a bedroom blaze, expose the new nanny as a drunken child-beater — nobody even pretends to like him.

The game’s not lost yet and Barrow knows it. There is a precedent for a smarmy, sarcastic, minor character to bail out of a smash-hit show as it is ending and to pop up with his own series that goes on to scoop more awards and make him far more money than the original ever did.

Remember Cheers, the all-star sitcom set in a Boston bar? Right down the cast list was a chap called Kelsey Grammer, who had the occasional line as a pompous snob living in terror of his shrill wife.

The skids have been under Barrow (left) since Cora’s maid Baxter (Raquel Cassidy, right) refused to be his spy upstairs in m’lady’s chamber

He wasn’t so much a character, more a cardboard cut-out at the end of the bar. His name was Frasier and, against every expectation, he landed a self-titled comedy pilot that went on to become the most erudite and dazzling sitcom ever made in America.

That’s the big prize. As Downton ends, a new period-drama-soap-opera-comedy called Barrow can begin. Better still, give the title an exclamation mark — Barrow!

Our cunning hero laid the groundwork by applying for the post of assistant butler at a nearby country house, a job that combined butling, valeting, chauffeuring and, I’ll be bound, engineering his new employers in or out of some fresh sticky mishap every week. How’s that for a sitcom situation?

Chuck in the odd guest appearance by Downton stars and U.S. cable channels will be fighting to commission the first 50 episodes before a word is written.

Frasier: Remember Cheers, the all-star sitcom set in a Boston bar? Right down the cast list was a chap called Kelsey Grammer (back centre), who had the occasional line as a pompous snob living in terror of his shrill wife

Not everyone was working as diligently as Barrow. Lady Mary seemed to have forgotten her history: she told Carson that he had been ‘in this house man and boy for half a century’ — though keen viewers will remember he actually started his career as half of a music-hall double act and came to butling late in life.

And Daisy the kitchen-maid (Sophie McShera) appeared to be auditioning for a revival of the Sixties hippie musical Hair, waving her arms around and railing against ‘the system’ like a one-woman protest movement.

There were plenty of girls wearing flowers in their hair in Cider With Rosie (BBC1), though this wasn’t San Francisco but Twenties Gloucestershire.

Not that you’d know it from the accents. The children sounded like The Wurzels were their voice coaches, while everybody else was practising the all-purpose rustic burr known as BBC West Country, probably in the hope of landing a part in Poldark.

Cider with Rosie: Tthe storyline was a muddle, staggering from Laurie Lee’s toddler days to teens, back and forth, as though the scenes had been plucked at random from a village hall tombola barrel

Laurie Lee’s much-loved memoir isn’t so much an autobiography, more a fragmented collection of vignettes in language closer to poetry than prose.

This adaptation, narrated by Timothy Spall (Timmarvey Spahrll, in Wurzel-speak), kept much of the lyrical quality: Laurie’s first sweetheart, for instance, had ‘flesh smoother than candle wax like something thrown down from the moon’.

But the storyline was a muddle, staggering from Laurie’s toddler days to teens, back and forth, as though the scenes had been plucked at random from a village hall tombola barrel.

Characters came and went without explanation. Who was the man beaten to death by the villagers? What happened to the schoolmistress who was slung over a pupil’s shoulder?

Perhaps the Beeb assumed we all know the book so well from schooldays that half a story was plenty. But in that case, why make a TV version at all?

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