Rape at the Abbey: has Downton gone too far for Sunday nights? Harman, who was playing Mr Green, a valet to one of Lady Mary's new admirers, cornered Anna in the servants" hall while the rest of the household listened to a performance by opera singer Dame Nellie Melba. When Anna resisted Green's advances, he hit her and then dragged her off to carry out his attack. Anna's heartrending screams were unheard over the strains of Puccini's 'O mio babbino caro," sung by Dame Kiri Te Kanawa who was playing the role of Melba. In the final scenes we saw Anna, cuts and bruises on her face, begging housekeeper Mrs Hughes for a comb and a new dress, and then trying to think of a reason to explain away her appearance to her husband. The response from viewers on social media sites was instantaneous - and in the main, condemnatory. One viewer described it as "sick and sensationalist"; another that Downton has 'fallen into the trap of bad soaps... It's totally unbelievable now (& that's saying something) ." Woman's campaigner Bidisha added that Downton Abbey had just lost a viewer for good in her: "What is it with male writers scribbling in a quick rape of a woman to spice things up? ...I'm not campaigning for rape survivors by day, watching it served up for entertainment at night." Before the attack: Anna plays cards with Green and Edna Yet could there be some defence for Fellowes" decision to introduce this traumatic storyline? Joanne Froggatt is a talented actor who rightly received an Emmy nomination in 2012; her distress following the attack seemed convincing, and haunting. And as for the sudden attack by Harman's valet, it could be argued that Downton has avoided the cliché of a complete stranger jumping out of the bushes, instead choosing the all-too-plausible idea of an acquaintance taking hideous advantage of circumstances where a woman has no one to turn to for help. "It's all too realistic a situation," says Dr Pam Cox, a social historian at Essex University who presented last year's BBC series Servants - The True Story of Life Below Stairs. Female servants were raped, abused and harassed. There was a hierarchy within the servants" hall and butlers and valets were in a position of power.... And in the early 20th century men had huge power over women - as is reflected in other Downton storylines like Mary's inability to run the estate. As to whether a servant like Anna would have reported such an attack, it was extremely common not to. If we see women in the 1970s only coming forward now in the light of the Jimmy Savile inquiry, what does that mean for women decades earlier? And yet, the scene left many uneasy. Partly because there was no real warning of the type of violence. And partly because Downton does not usually interact with social realism: it's escapist, high camp, Sunday night television. This, after all, is a saga which has attempted to tell its viewers with a straight face that one potential heir to Downton could feasibly survive the wreck of the Titanic, live in Canada with amnesia for years, and only regain his memory when a convenient shell at the battle of Passenchdaele restored it. Or that another heir could miraculously recover from paralysis because he needed to save his fiancée from a falling tea tray. In the upstairs/downstairs world of the Crawley estate, difficulty in opening a jar of jam is frequently given the same amount of gravitas as the lord of the manor nearly losing the estate through gambling debts. It's a fantasy where the Russian revolution is a minor blip; the Spanish flu gets rid of inconvenient fiancées within an episode and earls who are virulently anti-Catholic suddenly warmly welcome gay servants if they also happen to be good at cricket. The other problem is the character Fellowes chose. Anna is one of the best-loved in Downton: a rare beacon of goodness who stood by her husband Bates when everyone else thought him a murderer, and uncomplainingly helped Lady Mary dispose of the corpse of a former lover. "The entire concept of 'story' can pretty much be boiled down to bad things happening to people we can (usually) root for, which they overcome in the end through the power of persistence," says the novelist Jenny Colgan. When a character is tortured beyond endurance without redemption - Fantine in Les Miserables or Anna Karenina - it is to show that the system or the morality is rotten. But the problem is that Anna is morally blameless and in Downton the system is comfortingly portrayed as pleasant and paternalistic - whether it's Carson dispensing homespun advice to Lady Mary, Lady Violet advising former chauffeur Branson on social etiquette, or Lord Grantham worrying about the welfare of his servants. "There is no redemption to be gained from this, only misery as Anna is thrown casually to the wolves of narrative rather than, as in the best stories, being led there inexorably by the world she inhabits and the choices she makes," says Colgan. Realism is all very well but when storylines verge on the nasty and gratuitous, a writer should take care. Fellowes breaks his pact with viewers at his peril.