The third series of Peter Morgan’s monarchy fantasy starts with an in-joke. It is 1964, the year after the Beatles’ first LP and the invention of sexual intercourse, and the Queen is contemplating her new profile. “A great many changes,” Her Majesty says, regretting her transition from young woman to old bat, “but there we are”.
This moment of self-consciousness is necessary because the Queen, like Doctor Who, has regenerated, changing actresses. In the evolution of Her Majesty, the Queen’s fizzog has been chiselled from the gamine prettiness of Claire Foy to the more troubled visage of Olivia Colman, the latter being both slightly equine and — if we defer to the recent judgment of the Daily Telegraph — distinctly Left-wing.
But the scene implies an acknowledgment from the writer too, that telling the story of the Queen is like interrogating a postage stamp.
In truth, the focus of the drama has become a story of the age, albeit one viewed from within palace walls. The timeline runs to the retirement of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who shares his Alzheimer’s diagnosis with the Queen, if not the country, and is rewarded with a flirtatious moment of sadness.
Ted Heath fares less well. He is boring, and unable to dislodge the Queen’s sympathy for the National Union of Mineworkers after the candle-lit privations of the Three Day Week.
“Some bring a wife,” says the Duke of Edinburgh (Tobias Menzies), “others a grand piano”. Along the way, there is the death of Churchill, Anthony Blunt, the Aberfan disaster, and — a bit awkward, this — the time Lord Mountbatten (Charles Dance) got involved with an attempted coup against Wilson’s Labour government.
Netflix: The Crown - Series 3
For light relief, there’s the moon landing, and a palace visit from the Apollo astronauts, prompting a midlife crisis for the Duke of Edinburgh.
President Lyndon Johnson, somewhat cruelly, is rendered as a kind of proto-Trump. And, threaded throughout, there is the lonely decline of the Duke of Windsor, whose exile becomes a premonition of what will happen to Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor), as his love affair with Camilla is forcibly terminated by The Firm.
At its core, The Crown reflects the current orthodoxy about the royal family. It salutes the endurance of the monarch, acknowledges the wit of the Duke of Edinburgh and, faced with the glassy impenetrability of the royal establishment, feasts on the hedonism of the spare, Princess Margaret, who is played with glamorous destitution by Helena Bonham Carter. (The scene where she takes Roddy Llewellyn shopping for swimming trunks in Peebles is a peach).
It is a predicament, being an institution first and a human second. “They don’t want you to be normal,” Wilson tells the Queen. “They want you to be ideal. An ideal.” The royal life, says Charles, is “not so much an existence as a predicament”.
Do they think these things, the royals? We’re not allowed to ask, and they can’t tell. The desolation is magnificent, as the astronaut said to the duke.
The Crown series three is available to stream on Netflix from November 17.
Characters from The Crown Series 3 versus real life
