Class action: The Christmas Day clash of Downton and EastEnders

On ITV, a two-hour chunk of Julian Fellowes's Downton Abbey caters for those who long for a bygone aristocratic era of big houses, noblesse oblige, and docile servants.

On BBC1 there's a distended wodge of proletarian dysfunction in the shape of an hour-long EastEnders, bringing to a head some of the sad stories that have been brewing this week, and setting up others for a pay-off over the long slog to New Year's Day.

Their shared soapiness aside, the competing shows are polar opposites. It's the present vs the past, rus vs urbe, nostalgia vs schadenfreude. Downton paints a warm picture of the institutionally racist, horribly white, hierarchical past.

EastEnders ensures that a semi-representative cross-section of London's multicultural population all live equally grim lives, complete with attempted honour killings. One's about hobnobbing with the toffs, the other about slumming with hoi polloi.

Fellowes - the nation's Snobmaster General - and the battalions who crank out Walford misery, would doubtless argue that they are telling universal human stories. Rubbish. The signifiers of social class run through both shows like letters through a stick of rock.

I'll do my best to avoid spoilers, but if you don't want to know what Maggie Smith's acerbic dowager countess gets for Christmas in Downton, look away now.

CHRISTMAS SPIRIT
Downton is about excess and extravagance. Every meal is a banquet, lovingly turned out by the downstairs servants. One of the opening shots of the Yuletide special is of a giant Christmas tree, adorned with handmade tin soldiers, being lit in the grand hall of the titular pile. There's snow, charades (Lady Mary has to act out The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), a Yuletide pheasant shoot, even a ouija board to add a little supernatural frisson. There's also a brief inversion of the established order. The toffs give presents to and dance with their staff, and even - gasp - serve themselves food while the plebs party downstairs. Thereafter, the established order can be more confidently reasserted.

Everyone is dressed nicely in Downton, even the servants, especially during Mr Bates's murder trial.

Everyone in EastEnders is dressed by Poundland. EastEnders is about continuity of deprivation. "Still scrabbling around on the floor for coppers?" bitchy Janice asks fresh-out-of-chokey Bianca on Christmas Eve, as they shop for last-minute tat on the market.

Maggie Smith's Lady Grantham may look with minty disdain on the nutcrackers given her by Isobel Crawley but this is as nothing to the disappointment that will be felt by Bianca's children, or Kat and Alfie's little 'un. Homes here are so claustrophobic and overbright that the Queen Vic is an escape. If Downton's Christmas is soft candleflame reflected in a diamond shirt-stud, EastEnders is a harsh flash of striplights off Pat Butcher's earrings.

LORDS OF THE MANOR
The patriarch sets the tone for a family Christmas. Hugh Bonneville's Lord Grantham in Downton is a paragon of decency, a walking advert for the retention of the entire class system. When he smiles he looks like a child's drawing of a kind dad. Even though the Downton set have their problems - there being no drama without conflict - Grantham is a walking, talking, dickie-fronted assurance that all will be well.

The Walford clan, meanwhile, need only look at their "daddy", Phil Mitchell, to know that life, like him, will be nasty, brutish and short. Actor Steve McFadden's face has set into a perma-scowl, like a jelly made of malice that gets harder every year. EastEnders being more realistic, sort of, than Downton, Phil shares screen time with another bad dad, Ace Bhatti's psychotic Yusef, whose domineering abuse of wife Zainab comes to a head on Christmas day.

FAMILY VALUES
As Leo Tolstoy put it, happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The Downton lot's lips are so stiff they could have been pressed by a chambermaid with a flat iron. The toffs suffer by looking into the middle distance and clipping their sentences even more severely; the common folk snivel quietly then pull themselves together. Family anxiety in EastEnders is handled in extreme close-up and with mute staring. Alfie glares silently at Kat. Hatchet-faced Denise eyeballs boot-faced Shirley. And as Zainab, Nina Wadia makes her screen-filling features writhe with an exquisitely controlled anguish not seen since Linda Gray played Sue-Ellen in Dallas.

INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY
Coming at year's end, Christmas dramas hint at the death of the old, the birth of the new. The Great War still lingers in Downton in the shape of a picturesque injury - Sir Anthony Strallan's paralysed arm - and the odd dark aside. Otherwise, death comes, Agatha Christie-style, via the poison with which valet Mr Bates supposedly killed his wife, or by the hangman's noose that may (or may not) await him.

Last year's EastEnders Christmas saw the cot-death plotline, which gives baby Tommy Moon's first birthday extra poignancy this year. In some ways a violently sudden death is preferable in this postcode. Jean's mental disorders and Pat's mystery illness, expected by many to reach crisis point this weekend, actually drag on into the week. The demands of a soap that can broadcast four, five and now seven nights a week, are brutal.

CHRISTMAS CHEER
I can't tell you whether or not the Downton special has a happy ending, but it is quite funny, with Maggie Smith morphing more and more into a pantomime Dame, her extravagant eye-rolling here accompanied by a rather fruity stream of innuendo. Sadly, EastEnders long ago ceded any wit it possessed to Shameless. Its real value to viewers is the reassurance that their lives, and their Christmases, will never be as bad as those of Walford's urban underclass. As the Queen Vic's Angie Watts used to say: "Cheer up, it might never 'appen."

Downton Abbey ITV1, EastEnders BBC1, 9pm, Christmas Day.