Best drama Emmy award

Downton Abbey…or Breaking Bad? It’s such a fundamental choice. English versus American… contemporary against nostalgic…intelligent writing against empty formula…Can you tell which side I’m on? I’m delighted that Breaking Bad won, but was quite prepared to greet the victory of Downton Abbey with a dismissive sneer about the insignificance of media awards.

But it’s a matter of taste, and taste varies, a lot. I recently regaled a writer’s group with the story of the amazon listing of The Sopranos, which claimed that people who liked this also liked Downton Abbey. Who, I chortled, in the history of the world, has ever liked those two programmes? “Me”, says a good friend, whose taste is clearly more flexible than mine.