Is this dull, tasteless nonsense what Dan Stevens left Downton Abbey for? CHRISTOPHER STEVENS gives The Terror: Devil In Silver just two stars

The Terror: Devil In Silver (Sky Atlantic) two stars

Rating: Two stars 

Rating:

Some things are beyond forgiveness, and ruining Christmas is one of them. Fans of Downton Abbey will not have forgotten how Dan Stevens spoiled their festive viewing back in 2012.

There we were, millions of us, sipping our Baileys and wondering whether we had room for that last mince pie, when Dan's heartthrob character, Cousin Matthew, lost control at the wheel and was flung sprawling across the road to expire in a puddle of cranberry sauce.

Actors aren't usually to blame for rotten storylines, but Downton's creator Julian Fellowes was left with little choice after Dan decided to quit the series and seek fame in America.

How well that worked out can be gauged by his latest role, as Pepper, a New York refuse collector with a short fuse who ends up imprisoned in an old-fashioned mental asylum, in The Terror: Devil In Silver.

This six-part horror serial is part of what Americans pretentiously call an 'anthology'. That means it bears the same title as a previous, highly successful show, despite having nothing in common: different cast, different setting, different era.

The first series of The Terror was based on a true story, the doomed attempt by Sir John Franklin in the 1840s to find a 'North-west Passage' through the Arctic ice.

This one began as a novel by its screenwriter, Victor LaValle. It's set in the present day, with flashbacks to the grim post-war era when mental illness was treated by crude brain surgery called lobotomy.

The Jack Nicholson movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is an obvious inspiration, in particular for a scene where the patients are compelled to attend a group therapy session.

They sit in a semi-circle, truculent and bored, while a blandly sadistic doctor reads passages from Moby Dick and discourses at length on their allegorical meaning. It's so dull that I was quite glad when a corpse fell through the ceiling tiles with its throat ripped open.

Everyone who enters the New Hyde hospital ends up trapped, including the officers who dump Pepper there because they can't be bothered to fill out the paperwork after he assaulted them.

This makes no sense, and neither does the show's pretence that it is exposing the decrepit state of America's psychiatric hospitals. Far from it: The Terror is stirring up our instinctive fear of mental illness and wallowing in it.

Slapstick humour of the grimmest type breaks up the narrative. In a later episode, one medic uses a lobotomy hammer to break up the ice for his whisky on the rocks. Very tasteful.

One of the inmates at the hospital, Loochie, is played by an actor called b. I thought this was a misprint at first but apparently b is the whole and sole name. This must require constant explanations, but probably saves a lot of time on form-filling.