Belgravia: Julian Fellowes’ ITV series may prove popular but the UK is losing its appetite for dramas about class Since Downton Abbey launched in 2008 we have lived through a decade of austerity which has lessened our desire to watch entitled toffs

Baron Fellowes of West Stafford has been a very busy lord of the realm. The ennobled screenwriter and novelist, better known as Julian Fellowes – or “the man who gave us Downton Abbey” – has three major projects coming soon, all linked, inevitably, to class.

Social hierarchies are the writer’s specialist subject. Perhaps his only subject, in fact. Fellowes’ screenwriting career started with Robert Altman’s 2001 film Gosford Park and his debut novel was called Snobs.

His new Sunday night costume drama, Belgravia, is set in the exclusive London district during the 1840s, a period when the gentry were being gatecrashed by the mercantile classes.

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About to start filming, meanwhile, is his HBO drama The Gilded Age, which is set amid New York’s high society during the 1890s.

By the time The Gilded Age is released, we will also have seen Fellowes’ Netflix series The English Game, which charts the origins of football in the north of England in the 1880s and dramatises, according to Netflix, “how those involved in its creation reached across the class divide to establish the game”.

Belgravia appears to have all the necessary ingredients to appeal to fans of Downtown Abbey. There’s the social-climbing James Trenchard (Philip Glenister) and his ill-at-ease wife Anne (Tamsin Greig); a bevvy of dukes, duchesses and miladies, one of them played by Harriet Walter in the sort of waspish role taken in Downton by Maggie Smith; and there are, of course, servants.

Upstairs, downstairs – a fail-safe formula. And yet I’m not so sure.

With a self-isolating audience ready for escapism, Belgravia should attract eager millions, although I don’t think it will touch the phenomenon that was Downton Abbey.

Why? That show launched in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and with the Labour Party still firmly in government. The world of the Crawleys felt distant.

Ten years of austerity introduced by the gilded duo of David Cameron and George Osborne and a divisive Brexit figureheaded by Cameron’s fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson might have lessened the public’s appetite for entitled toffs, while the travails of the nouveaux riches trying to enter high society couldn’t seem less relevant when society’s apex, the Royal Family, has rarely looked so threadbare.

Downton Abbey was also set in the north of England and (crucially) in the countryside, with gun dogs, fine vistas and a sense of rural isolation that appealed to our predominantly urban population.

In Belgravia, we have London society (exteriors filmed in Edinburgh), and nobody these days has a good word to say about the “metropolitan elite”, least of all Fellowes’ Conservative Party.

But that’s not the only reason that Belgravia might not prove as popular as Downton. Bouncing between 1815 and 1841, the new show has a wider canvas but narrower class divide.

The genius of Downton was its absolute clarity. That Yorkshire country estate may have been a microcosm of British society but it was also a world unto itself.

There were comings and goings, but viewers were safely tethered to the big house.

Indeed, much of Downton’s appeal was in the equal dramatic weighting given to the servants.

“You were no less involved with the kitchen maid than you were with Edith Crawley,” said Fellowes in response to his critics.

Fellowes’ strength is the breadth and depth of his knowledge of his favourite subject; his weakness may be in overestimating our shared fascination.

Belgravia starts at 9pm on Sunday on ITV. The English Game is available on Netflix from Friday.