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And so it came to pass that Martha Levinson and Dowager Countess Violet finally came face to face at Downton Abbey. As Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley's wedding loomed, the long-awaited encounters of the two grande dames did not disappoint.

Across the dinner table or in a church pew, they were like a pair of grizzled gunslingers, trading acid quips instead of bullets. Not so painful perhaps, but almost as deadly.

'Oh dear,' cried Martha, pouncing on Maggie Smith's Violet in the hallway and gleefully eyeing up her wrinkles. 'The war has made old women of us both.'

'Oh no,' Violet begged to differ. 'I stay out of the sun.'

In the delirious new series of Downton Abbey, which began last night, Martha (Shirley MacLaine) came crunching down the drive at last. She was wearing jazz shoes, what appeared to be a fur papoose and a frozen expression on her face. We'd better get to like it — it's the only one she's got.

As Lady Grantham's American mother, Martha's job is to patronise the English and their stuffy ways at every opportooonity. Hey, someone has to show these squares that the egalitarian delights of the New World, with its lack of pretence and stifling tradition, are the way forward.

'Tradition!' she sneers regularly, in the finest showbiz tradition.

She insists upon boiled water and goat's milk at all times, but I must say Shirley's little dolly face seems slightly out of place amid the lush velvets and sprinkling of aristocratic Downton dust. Did they even have Botox and crafty pearly highlighter in them days?

Shirl also seems to be acting to a different beat, but maybe she gets her stage directions on a time loop straight from Cecil B. DeMille himself? Who can say, but she is certainly a delicious target for Violet to be horrid about.

'When I am with her, I am reminded of the virtues of the English,' she said.

But Martha isn't English, someone protested. 'Quite,' replied Violet, who later added that Martha is 'like a homing pigeon, she finds our underbelly every time'. Is that what homing pigeons do?

Meanwhile, hang onto your inheritance, kids, for there is trouble looming. We know the Wall Street Crash is just a few years away, but Lord Grantham's in the soup already.

He had to go up to London on the 2.30 train to see Somebody In An Office Wearing A Fobwatch. This can only mean one thing.

You see, the dopey Earl invested all of his wife's money in something called the Canadian Grand Trunk Line — and it has only gorn off the rails!

'Are you really telling me all the money has gone? The lion's share of Cora's fortune?' he shouted, as Fobwatch nodded sadly.

'I refuse to be the failure, the Earl who dropped the torch and let the flame go out. I have a duty beyond saving my own skin,' he said, munching through the freshly steamed script like a hungry termite.

Back at Downton, when he told Cora the bad news, she admonished the silly sausage as if he had merely lost one of his socks, not her hard-inherited millions.

You know, I'm beginning to think that Cora might be a little mad. It's not just that simpering smile. Maybe that slip on a bar of soap in series one damaged more than we ever knew?

Still, the money might have gone but, amazingly, by some kind of well-I-never dramatic osmosis, the earl-in-waiting was thinking of downsizing anyway.