Hotel Portofino, ITV1, review: Don't bother with this cheap Downton ...

If you want to know why Julian Fellowes is worth his weight in gold, then compare his scripts for Downton Abbey with those supplied to the actors in Hotel Portofino, ITV’s blatant “new” (it screened on BritBox last year) Downton knock-off.

Set in 1926 and starring Natascha McElhone as Bella Ainsworth, the British owner of the titular Italian hotel, this is actually Downton mixed with the sunshine of The Durrells, but a pale imitation of both. Needless to say, a second series has already been commissioned and filmed.

There is the inevitable upstairs-downstairs scenario, with a homely north-country British cook who might as well have simply been called Mrs Patmore. Instead, the writers went to the effort of naming her Betty. She’s given to moaning about Italian beef’s inability to make good dripping and the waxiness of the local potatoes.

And then there’s the waspish aunt, Lady Latchmere, Anna Chancellor channelling Maggie Smith – although her put-downs are unmemorable compared to Violet Crawley’s. There was a stab at comedy in the first episode when the teetotal Lady Latchmere was served limoncello as a medicine, but Chancellor is so far generally underserved.

Bella has three marriageable children: two barely glimpsed daughters and a son, Lucian (Oliver Dench), who has artistic aspirations. Lucian’s romantic entanglements were one of the main plot drivers. His rotter of a father, the impecunious Cecil (Mark Umbers) wanted to marry him off to the daughter of a wealthy old flame, a lemon-sucking snob who dismissed Bella as “the kind of woman who thinks nothing of running a hotel”. A trade, in other words.

But Lucian had thrown his net far and wide – the family’s nanny Constance (Louisa Binder) inevitably catching his eye. And there was a nice Indian doctor (racial stereotyping, or simply also throwing The Good Karma Hospital into the mix?), Anish (Assad Zaman). He treated a wounded Lucian in the trenches of the First World War and now yearned for his former patient. The homoerotic storyline was one of several straight out of the Downton playbook.

Blackmail was another, a local fascist intercepting Bella’s extra-marital love letters and putting the tighteners on her. Not that Bella had much money – especially since Cecil had spent his family trust fund and was not above dipping into Bella’s petty cash box. He was in good – or rather bad – company, for most of the hotel’s male guests seem to be dodgy, including Adam James (Vigil) as an abusive American art dealer.

Indeed, if a character was an adult and male in Hotel Portofino, you could safely put him down as a wrong’un. It was all a bit panto – they might as well have had pencil-thin moustaches and Dick Dastardly laughs. In fact, the most authentic performance here was supplied by the coast of Croatia, giving a ravishing impersonation of the 1920s Italian Riviera.

As Bella, McElhone was undeniably a class act, although so far she has been confined to wandering the hotel with a beatific smile and being endlessly patient with Cecil. Such saintliness does make you yearn for Basil Fawlty to somehow magically intervene.

The opening episode was titled “First Impressions” – a hostage to fortune if ever there was one. My first impressions of Hotel Portofino were that the script had efficiently laid out its storyline arcs, but that the one-dimensional characters weren’t inviting enough to join them on their various journeys.

Unlike The White Lotus, this wasn’t an Italian hotel I’m going to relish returning to each week.