Long live the tenacity of the Unwelcome Suitor

Just to dwell on "Downton" a bit longer (bear with me - it's been a tiring week), I have now caught up on the second series and watched all of it on DVD (three episodes in one evening). Thank heaven there will be a third series when they simply must tie up all the loose ends. One welcome development is that there's a new villain on the block. Mary's fiancé Sir Richard Carlisle has become increasingly nasty until he is now a full-blown example of that old and extremely useful group of baddies: the Unwelcome Suitor.

Granted, Sir Richard is an unsubtle specimen, but it has to be said for the Unwelcome Suitor - and I've seen dafter ones than Sir Richard - that they add a certain spice to the intrigue. They are so very hard to shake off. It is easy to grow tired of two lovers who constantly misunderstand each other and therefore do not hitch up until the very end. But add an external threat to their happiness, and it all gets more interesting. Few characters can have more of a vested interest in trampling True Love underfoot than the man who intends to pick up the pieces in the shape of a pretty heroine (a girl who wants the hero has an interest too, but often - as in "Downton Abbey" - she makes trouble more or less unwittingly by being too nice to ditch, rather than too nasty).

It is small wonder that the Unwelcome Suitor is such a stock character. The question you need to answer convincingly, though, if you want to include him in your drama is: why on earth does he bother? After all, you mostly find him in stories which take place in olden times when it was much more imperative for a girl to marry, and when the marriage market was very much a buyer's market. As you have to be tolerably rich and/or powerful to pose a threat in the first place, most Unwelcome Suitors are, from a material point of view, eligible bachelors. This means they can have their pick of girls. Why should they go for the surly one who doesn't even pretend to care for them?

The answer mostly given is that the blackguard, villainous that he is, finds the heroine's reluctance a turn-on in itself. There's the thrill of the chase. Thus the old well-worn baddie line: "I like a woman with a temper" (a line I have never, ever heard a man utter in real life). Fair enough, but as the Dowager in "Downton" says in quite another context, "marriage is a long business". How much fun can it be to spend the rest of your life tied to a woman in a grump? The villain who simply wants the heroine's virtue is more easily understandable than the breed who insists on marriage.

It's certainly worth the time of an author or script-writer to try to find plausible answers to the questions raised by the presence of an Unwelcome Suitor, though, as the best of them are such corkers. Just think of Uriah Heep, whose motive besides desiring Agnes - that he has made it his life project to lord it over his erstwhile employers - is perfectly convincing. Of course, he would be utterly tired of Wickfield-tormenting after ten years or so, but being a bitter Dickensian villain he doesn't realise it. Yep, I buy it. Roll on the fun.

As for Sir Richard, he has a long, long way to go before he can even be mentioned on the same day as the best in the Unwelcome Suitor field. At some point in the future, I believe we are owed a full explanation of why he doesn't just forget about Mary. She may not have given him the whole Dickensian heroine brush-off, but she can plainly hardly bear to touch him. Just what kind of team does he expect them to make?