Downton Abbey takes on Walford in Christmas Day ratings battle

Lady Edith finally got her happy ending as she patched things up with her sister Lady Mary after a long-standing feud between the pair.

The hugely successful period drama will bid farewell after tonight’s two-hour special, which finds the Crawleys at the end of 1925.

Speaking about her time on the show, she said: “We’ve made friends for life, you know Laura [Carmichael] and I are not anxious about not seeing each other because we live very close by one another, we see each other all the time”. Nobody regrets ending when we did.

He tells The Sun newspaper, “Production were checking our pockets (to make sure) that we weren’t stealing anything!”

Only the Queen’s Christmas message was watched by more people, with 7.2 million tuning in live to hear the 10-minute lunchtime address across both ITV1 and BBC1.

ITV said: “This is the first time a Downton Christmas special has topped the ratings in the United Kingdom on Christmas Day”.

But as much as we truly appreciated this awesome end, and fantastic is the only word we could use to describe it, the question on every Downton Abbey fan’s mind this morning is “why did it have to end?”

Storylines are, for the most part, carefully concluded and where they’re not neatly tied up we can at least imagine what future might lie ahead.

Though the series finale aired on ITV Christmas Day, tying up numerous leftover strands from series 6; Neame did also state that he and fellow writer Julian Fellowes “are keen” for a potential cinematic spin-off.

EastEnders, meanwhile, will follow festive specials of Doctor Who, Strictly Come Dancing and Call the Midwife on BBC One.

However, with no one show breaking the seven million barrier, viewing figures as a whole are down on previous years.