The Crown is a royal drama even a republican could love

Hit series The Crown’s third season manages the transition to a new cast with deftness.

The Crown’s new Queen, Olivia Colman, is an absolutely convincing, grandly traditional version of Her Majesty.

What is it about the idea of the monarchy that makes it such a captivating thing that it can lure a world of people who might not think of themselves as royal watchers?

It’s true that we’ve been enthralled by the drama behind the throne since Shakespeare — think of our images of the villainy of Richard III and the heroism of Henry V, the tragic actorish weakness of Richard II.

But, right at the moment, the thing that makes a huge international television-watching audience glow at the thought of the Queen and all her intimates is the new season of The Crown, with a new Queen, Olivia Colman, and a new Princess Margaret, Helena Bonham Carter. It’s an enthralling prospect to all sorts of people in this country who might have thought 20-odd years ago that Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull were dead right in their push for a republic.

Entertainment and fascination, of course, know no politics. Eminent British biographer of Margaret Thatcher and Spectator columnist Charles Moore, quite an old charmer himself in his fox-hunting, BBC-hating way, ­declared the other week that Colman could not play the Queen because she had a left-wing face. But the new third series of The Crown proves him dead wrong.

The actress who won an Oscar for playing Queen Anne in The Favourite is an absolutely convincing, grandly traditional version of Her Majesty, and you know within seconds of the new season opening that she is as stately and as poised, as grand and, if need be, remote as anyone’s image of the Queen who has ruled Britain since 1953. It’s marvellously deft the way the new season of The Crown manages the transition ­between the girlishly graceful Claire Foy, who played the Queen in the previous two seasons, and the somewhat more matronly Colman. We see respective stamps of them in profile that make the ­devel­opment seem feasible. And that shared voice, which seems to defy the masses of the world, even as it serves democracy, performs its own wonders of continuity.

It’s 1964 and John Lithgow’s Winston Churchill is on his last legs (indeed he dies and we get a snippet of the grandeur of the ­funeral). Harold Wilson — convincingly played by Jason Watkins — is now prime minister and, although there are rumours about how the Russians tried to recruit him as a spy when he was young, the figure with the smoke of treachery is Anthony Blunt (Sam West), who we hear discoursing about how one figure can be painted over another in a great painting.

This is made cleverly thematic in the opening episode when Prince Philip, now played by the hawkish middle-aged Tobias Menzies, tells Blunt of the rev­enges he will take. Blunt replies that a certain figure, very high in the royal family, was rumoured to be in the shadows behind the Profumo affair, the sex scandal that rocked Britain and brought down the Tory government.

That’s how The Crown works. There may be titbits of gossip we’ve heard (the Duke of Edinburgh was a sailor, wasn’t he, and they famously roam, don’t they?) and anyone of a certain age remembers all that scandal associ­ated with Christine Keeler and can quickly fill in the youngsters in any Crown-watching household.

It plays on the fact the royal family exhibits the purest form of celebrity: it’s made up of ordinary people who nevertheless are born to a level of veneration and fame that transcends normal celebrity because it is grounded in tradition and heredity.

They are the only famous people who don’t have to reveal themselves nakedly, yet everything they do becomes an object of obsessive attention.

Think of how we know (whether we’re interested or not) about the tension between Will and Kate and Harry and Meghan. Just as we did with their predecessors — of whom Princess Diana, Will and Harry’s mother, was the most Mar­ilyn Monroe-like and most doomed, that TV art history nun Sister Wendy said Warhol should have screen-printed her because he showed that celebrity was a kind of nothingness and perhaps came with a tragic sense of the void: the tiny details loom hugely.

The new season of The Crown has the enormous advantage of Bonham Carter as that royal glamourpuss and tearaway, Princess Margaret — a superb counterpoint to Colman’s never less than dignified monarch. In the first episode the princess — whom Christopher Hitchens said he’d seen sit down at a piano and bawl out My Old Man’s a Dustman — sings Just One of Those Things.

In the second episode she’s centrestage because her sister insists for diplomatic and political reasons that she have dinner at the White House with president Lyndon Baines Johnson. There she comes out with limericks about young women from Delaware who like to have sex in their underwear and also sings a duet of Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better with LBJ. There’s a moment when there’s a flashback in which Tommy Lascelles (Pip Torrens), one of the Crown’s keepers and henchmen, tells the young Margaret that her sister’s role will always be centrestage whereas hers is in the wings.

But we also hear about the myth of the tearaway, fun-soaked wastrel in the royal family (Edward VII, who had been the womanising Prince of Wales, Bertie; Edward VIII, who abdicated and became the Duke of Windsor to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, whom he’d fallen for as a playboy; Margaret who wasn’t allowed to marry the man she wanted and settled first for an arty, sexually ambiguous photographer and ended up having an eight-year ­romance with the much younger Roddy Llewellyn), and how these figures are balanced by the ­responsible ones such as Victoria, George V and the Queen.

It’s all soap, it’s all mythology, it’s all a bit irresistible because the contrast between the dutiful sister and the self-indulgent rebel no doubt has its mirrorings in all sorts of families.

And as a kind of pageant of the gossip of everyday life with a panoramic backdrop of history The Crown plays on the fact the royal family in real life — and a fortiori when they are dramatised and fictionalised like this — allows for the contrasts in moral positions to take on a certain monumental grandeur.

Certainly Colman does the fullest possible justice to the figure of the Queen, who since her early 20s has led a life of relentless public service that has commanded the undying respect of all sorts of people, Australian politicians, Liberal and Labor among them, who believe that a republic is the ­rational step beyond mythology.

Colman’s Queen is a woman of great dignity and sense of duty, very aware of the weight of the crown she has to wear but carrying it with grace and intelligence.

And Bonham Carter is luscious and seductive as Margaret, the “spoilt brat” who could always misbehave because she never had the top job and who wore her transfiguration of her sister’s looks and her tossing aside any of her iron discipline like a badge of honour. In that respect she’s an absolutely appropriate successor to Vanessa Kirby, who became ­famous for the sap and bite of her Margaret in the earlier seasons.

These first two episodes are ­directed by Benjamin Caron, ­expertly and with a fine dramatic economy.

But behind them you can see the shaping hand of that master of the popular, Stephen Daldry, who knows exactly how to use the ­familiarities of the Windsor story and how to bring alive the kinks and the shadow lines, the surprises that may lurk behind the ­cavalcade.

Candles and winds and the poignancies of royalty are central to the dramas The Crown recapitulates and concocts.

The other thing it plays on is the sheer reasonableness of constitutional monarchy and, with the Queen, its longevity. Older Australians stood in the sun as she drove past them and remember it. Constitutional monarchies have a better track record than most ­republics.

I remember at the time of the referendum on the republic hearing about someone who had an 11th-hour hesitation about ditching constitutional monarchy and asking his constitutional lawyer brother.

“For God’s sake,” he was told. “If you believe in constitutional monarchy vote for the minimal republican model. It’s our last chance to preserve it. It won’t come again.”