It's now clear why Julian Fellowes was made a Tory life peer last year: for services he was about to render to the Conservative-led coalition in stupefying a nation with some of the most unprofitable questions ever posed by a prime-time British drama. Will Downton Abbey's eligible girls (Snooty, Pouty and Dowdy) ever find true love? Will Bates ever be free of his barmy ex, even though she is, in fact, dead? Are Fish Face and Evil Smoking Guy for real?

And now along comes news of the Downton Christmas special, which will fill our mental in-trays with more insufferable imponderables. Apparently, the special will introduce a new character called Lord Hepworth, played by veteran roué Nigel Havers. The Countess of Grantham (Dame Maggie Smith) will have to decide whether he's most suitable for Lady Mary, Lady Edith or Lady Sibyl. But hold on. Aren't two of them already spoken for? And anyway, isn't Havers old enough to have fathered their father? Is this a Woody Allen wish-fulfilment drama now? See, already I've been suckered into caring about a backward-looking potboiler that should be beneath my contempt.

Downton Abbey not only depicts a reactionary social order; it helps create one. It isn't so much an export product from a nation that has nothing more innovative with which to capture foreigners' imaginations (though it's certainly that), but the TV equivalent of bromide in soldiers' tea to make living in recession Britain palatable for a people who really ought to know better.

But we don't. That's why department stores recently reported a 100% year-on-year increase in sales of silk dressing gowns and cotton pyjamas as favoured by the Earl of Grantham, played by Hugh Bonneville. French revolutionary Alphonse de Lamartine explained why his countrymen and women ousted King Louis Philippe in 1848: "La France est une nation qui s'ennuie" (France is bored). In France, boredom catalyses revolution; here, a rise in pyjama sales.

It would be churlish not to recognise the politicised minority who are rising up and occupying things, but the overwhelming narrative of recession Britain is one of political quiescence and cultural conservatism. Welcome to the New Boring, of which Downton Abbey and its ancillary industries (dull interviews, dressing gowns, National Trust season tickets, butler-length eyebrow extensions) is the most perfect expression in its conservatism, vapidity and conformism. The New Boring upholds a law announced by French situationist Guy Debord, who very sensibly killed himself in 1994 so there was no chance of him witnessing the Z-listers who have joined Ant and Dec in the jungle. Namely: "Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always."

The term New Boring isn't mine. It was coined earlier this year by Popjustice.com's Peter Robinson in a Guardian article that suggested pop's Beige Wave – Adele, Mumford and Sons, cathedral-blighting folk simperer Laura Marling – had created a vortex of boredom, "a boretex, if you will". He had a point: if I ever hear the piano arpeggios of Adele's Someone Like You prop up some Very Poignant Moment in another documentary, I shall become so angry that I shall set fire, not to the rain, but to the car that's been double-parked in the street playing Rolling in the Deep on a loop for 48 hours straight.

Robinson particularly had it in for Ed Sheeran, whose lamest lines ("I'm up an' coming like I'm fucking in an elevator", "I've never owned a Blu-ray, true say" and "Suffolk sadly seems to sort of suffocate me") are impossible for intelligent persons to read without rolling their eyes. Robinson's disturbing thesis was that the Old Boring (Coldplay, Leona Lewis) hadn't gone away but had been augmented by the New Boring in a pincer movement that threatened to squeeze the joie de vivre out of this already spiritually depleted nation.

But what Robinson didn't explore is the fact that the New Boring extends its remit way beyond music and throughout culture. Think, just as an example, of knitwear. Season two of The Killing arrives this weekend, which means that the global shortage of Faroe Isles sweaters will intensify as every woman of a certain IQ seeks to look like Sofie Gråbøl. At the same time, Netaporter.com has commissioned designers to produce novelty Christmas jumpers, even though they and everybody else surely know that novelty Christmas jumpers can only be worn by sad-eyed poshos in thrall to their mothers, as Colin Firth demonstrated so brilliantly in Bridget Jones's Diary.

This is what Britain will look like on Christmas morning: every marital bedroom will have a man in a beige Downton dressing gown trying to get their hands up the ghastly jumper of a woman who thinks she's fashion forward, but is really fashion boreward (dammit – even the New Boring's neologisms are tedious). No matter: as the fashionistas say in their 10 Point Winter Wardrobe Fashion Plan: "[This year festive jumpers are the last word." And I always thought the last word was Zzzzzzz.

Fashion also tells us that polo necks, sensible jumpers, pencil skirts, loafers and brogues are in and thus by definition expressions of New Boring this season. If you're wearing any of these items while reading this on the bus and are wondering why everybody around you is shaking their heads sadly, now you know why.

Nor did Robinson realise that the Beige Wave has a political function. It's not only Baron Fellowes of West Stafford who deserved to be ennobled for crushing the spirit of a nation and making it more supine in the face of government cuts, nor should there be just Lady Adele of Tottenham or Baron Sheehan of Suffolk. Many others have worked tirelessly to subdue a whole population during recession by boring us silly and have thereby made us incapable of strangling George Osborne with the entrails of Sir Fred Goodwin. The people responsible for the X Factor, obviously. The people responsible for the Champions' League group stages (a perennial bore but – or is it just me? – more insufferable than usual). The PR placement artists responsible for the Middeltons and all their works, especially Pippa's insufferably posh bum. Those who let Julian Barnes win the Booker, prompting all the articles/tweets/blog posts about how boring it was that Julian Barnes had won the Booker. And let's not forget all the people who'll post boring replies on the end of this meta-boring article moaning about how boring writing about the New Boring is.

Lest you think the New Boring will be over in six months, two words: the Olympics. Is there anything more boring than waiting the best part of a year for Team GB's relay crew to drop the baton on the back straight of the 4x100m final, or for interviews about where it all went wrong in the semi with Britain's hopeless and inarticulate heptathlete/clay pigeon marksperson/Greco-Roman wrestler? Yes, there is. There's watching Jessica Ennis run dead-eyed across a beach on a pop-up ad on every boring web page you click on. Or those unsmilingly buff athletes with milk moustaches on every bus just out of reach of defacers' spray cans.

Is there anything more boring than the prospect of spending from now until Christmas watching footballer Robbie Savage bare his torso and dry hump Craig Revell-Horwood's desk? Yes, there is. There is thinking about how wrong it is that the Queen gave Brucie a knighthood rather than insisting he do the decent thing and retire for the public good. Not that I'm saying, you understand, that Strictly Come Dancing, is boring.

The New Boredom is everywhere. Think of Kirstie Allsopp (is it insignificant that so many of the New Bores are insufferable toffs with reactionary agendas, such as her and Julian Fellowes? The question was rhetorical), her fascist craft programme and its allied book.

It was one thing to be nine and have Val Singleton on Blue Peter tell me how to make a functionally useless mobile for my mother's birthday with knicker elastic, used washing-up liquid bottles and spit. It is quite another to be an adult and face Allsopp's aristo homilies directed at making povvo proles shape up and cut their expenditure in line with the decline in real wages by reviving dead "crafts" as part of a TV-government conspiracy dreamed up by her and George Osborne on a billionaire's yacht moored off Corfu (that meeting probably never happened, but, in making it up, I feel justified because the actual truth of Kirstie's commissioning process is surely even more boring).

The blurb for her book reads: "Kirstie Allsopp's love affair with British crafts took off when she renovated her house in Devon." My hate affair with craft started when I was bought a stencil kit and it was suggested I could use it to decorate my Walthamstow slum. Allsopp has spent ages on the road "finding the things that make our Great British crafting nation truly great". So whether you want to make your own jewellery, crochet your own cushions, distress your own furniture or simply self-lobotomise and puree the resultant brain tissue to make authentic medieval stippling paint to decorate your garden chimenea (I made the last one up), then buy what is billed as "the ultimate crafting bible". Or realise that lost crafts got lost for a reason and save yourself a few bob.

Again, there is political purpose to Allsopp's eulogy to the crafts of this United Boredom: as the nights draw in, as recession bites, let's do all those boring crafts that we would have disdained in happier times. Let's get busy with our darning needles rather than revolting against those, including Allsopp, who are cashing in on people's anxiety about money to bore us more.

Hence, too, the unstoppable rise of baking shows in the proving bowl of recession Britain. True, the fact that Mary-Anne didn't win The Great British Bake Off still makes me shake my fist skywards at an unfeeling God, but let me ask you two questions: do we, the fattest nation in Europe, really need to bake more cupcakes than those Manhattanite singleton bores (you know who I mean) inflicted on us a few years back? Is there anything more tiresome than Facebook friends describing their zen moments kneading Finnish rye from Nigella's recipe and MMS-ing you minute-by-minute pictures of the bloody thing rising in the airing cupboard? Again, these questions were rhetorical.

What's especially striking about the New Boring is how much of it is tied to our anxiety about recession, how it saws the lid off the cranium of our fears and implants nasty little electrodes that switch us into boring panic mode every five seconds. Think, if you can bear to, of supermarket price wars. Sainsbury's currently offers a till voucher if your total bill is more than it would have been at Tesco. Asda has something similar. Rather than all of these supermarkets actually lowering their prices and stopping ripping us all off, they're going to bore us into submission by inducing us to doing fiddly little calculations. But, here's the twist, they know we won't do those calculations because they're too boring. As is sitting on hold trying to change your electricity supplier, whatever the energy secretary Chris Huhne says.

Kierkegaard argued that boredom predates the beginning of the world: "The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings." Later, bored human beings created Downton Abbey, Adele and Allsopp: nobody said we weren't virtuoso masochists made in the gods' images.

How do we escape the New Boredom? In his recent book The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, McKenzie Wark recalled one of the best slogans of May 1968 Paris: "Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault with reality." That slogan is not quite right, since there is not just a fault with reality but our attitude to it. The aforementioned penseur Guy Debord argued the real business of late capitalism is to ensure wholesale alienation, rendering invisible to us the reality of the world: hence the spectacle of Strictly, must-have novelty Christmas jumpers, and crocheting your cushions à la Kirstie.

Part of us, amid the vicissitudes of the times, in all our despair about the future and insecurity, seeks refuge from the reality of the world in such soothing examples of the New Boring, making the real business of late capitalism easier. Retailers and media companies, not to mention their footsoldiers (Fellowes, Allsopp and the rest) sensing the customers' yearning to be comfortably numb, to be unchallengingly bored, gleefully supply us with the wherewithal. "On the horizon of the modern world dawns the black sun of boredom," wrote Debord's co-consiprator Henri Lefebvre. Today it all but fills our field of vision.

In a sense we couldn't be in a worse position to overturn this United Boredom since we partly crave what holds us back, what dresses us in beige dressing gowns, sensible shoes and novelty jumpers. But boredom isn't our destiny; it's something to escape. The point isn't to see the world as it is but to make it less boring, argued Debord. We have nothing to lose but our Downton Abbey pyjamas.