Watching a day’s filming for the new season of The Crown, I had the dizzying impression that organising a shoot of Winston Churchill’s state funeral must have been only marginally less complex than organising Winston Churchill’s state funeral. On a sunny September day last year there was a cast of 300, many of them in full military costume, and a crew of 250. The congregation was issued with perfect facsimiles of the real order of service used on 30 January 1965. Dozens of people, their functions mysterious, busied themselves in the side aisles: everything was done with hushed precision and respect for instinctively understood hierarchies. Winchester Cathedral was playing St Paul’s, and the director of photography, Adriano Goldman, was keeping his eye on its performance via the puffs of water vapour that were helping create what he called “God’s light” – the gleaming shafts lancing down from the clerestory windows.

Over and over again, Olivia Colman’s Queen walked down the aisle to her place next to Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) and Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies). For a few moments, but not much more, it seemed odd to see older actors in place of Claire Foy, Vanessa Kirby and Matt Smith, the much beloved principal cast of The Crown’s first two seasons. As the Queen settled herself into her pew she took an uncertain, sidelong glance at Harold Wilson, channelled rather than played by the chameleon-like Jason Watkins, who has perfected Wilson’s slight stoop of the shoulders and laryngeal voice. The illusion of a tremendously regal, solemn occasion was almost complete, if you overlooked the fact that Bonham Carter and Colman were wearing comfortable slippers rather than polished court shoes between takes.

The British sense of intimacy with the real Queen has largely been built through television – ever since her coronation provoked a rush on TVs in 1953. The makers of The Crown, back when they were pitching it in late 2013 and early 2014, assumed it would end up as a BBC co-production. But it was the upstart streaming service Netflix that offered the writer Peter Morgan, director Stephen Daldry and Left Bank Films chief executive Andy Harries creative freedom and a commission for 20 episodes on the spot – an act of confidence almost unheard of in the famously dilatory world of TV.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Colman as the Queen: ‘We always thought it should be Olivia, right from the beginning. It’s not about looks – it’s about a quality.’ Photograph: Miller Mobley

And then there were Netflix’s resources. One reason The Crown turned out to be so unexpectedly compelling, given the fact it is about a rather dull family made exceptional only by an accident of birth, is that by and large, it feels right. Even the most punctilious, pedantic British viewer can settle into it without flinching at (too many) historical inaccuracies, or false notes by way of costume, location or language. This is the result of tremendous care enabled by a huge budget of £50m per season (or the cost of around six BBC dramas), and rising. In some years it costs more to make The Crown than it does to fund the real Queen’s sovereign grant – that is, the income from her estates that she is allocated by the government. (For 2016–17, the year The Crown first aired, that grant was £42.8m.) All those expensive efforts I saw in Winchester were cut down to mere seconds of footage for the first episode of season three, which covers the period between Wilson’s election in 1964 and the silver jubilee of 1977.

The new season will be a particular test for The Crown’s makers, with its change of principal cast and a group of new young actors to take on Prince Charles, Princess Anne and Camilla Parker Bowles, or Shand, as she then was. To start with, Colman was fitted with blue contact lenses to match her eyes to Foy’s – something that turned out to be a disastrous move, according to Ben Caron, who directs the first four episodes. It made Colman seem as if “she was acting behind a mask,” he says. “It was as if we had taken all of her acting ability and put it in a safe and locked it away.” They tested turning her eyes blue in post-production, using visual effects. “But it didn’t feel like her. CGI-ing her eyes seemed to diminish what she was doing.”

So, disconcertingly perhaps, the middle-aged Queen will have Colman’s deep-brown eyes. There was never any question that it would be her who played the next Queen. The Crown’s casting director Nina Gold told me: “We always thought it should be Olivia, right from the beginning. The thing everybody loves about Claire was that she transmits her humanity in a very simple, plain, not-doing-anything kind of a way: you just get it. We felt that was exactly the same thing Olivia does. It’s not about looks – it’s about a quality.”

***

Everything on The Crown begins and ends with its creator, the writer and executive producer Peter Morgan, a slim, serious, dark-haired man of 56 who seems almost to vibrate with energy. The project is his all-consuming passion. “I’ve gone all in on it,” he says. “I can’t believe I’m still here, years in. I cannot believe that I wake up in the morning and I’m still writing this stuff.” He writes weekdays and weekends, sending pages to his closest colleagues as he goes, sometimes several times a day. “The core producing team live and breathe The Crown on an almost cellular level,” executive producer Suzanne Mackie tells me. Season three is still only the halfway point: six seasons are projected; by the time it finishes, The Crown will have moved all the way from the death of George VI in 1952 to the 2010s. The seasons tend to coincide with prime ministerial terms: next year’s season four, for example, will take the action up to the resignation of Gillian Anderson’s Margaret Thatcher, before another change of cast for the final two series.

Peter might write a massive speech overnight. And in the morning you read that and think, ‘Wow, that’s a Crown moment’

A small group of trusted producers and script executives assembles at Morgan’s home in central London around three times a week.“We read the scripts aloud as a team, which is hilarious, as we’re all so bad,” Mackie says. “And we’ll stop and say, ‘That doesn’t feel true, that feels wrong.’” After these “table reads” Morgan refines and reworks, or the direction of travel might change mid-flow. “Peter felt season one was about her, the princess becoming the reluctant queen,” Mackie says. “Season two was about them, the Queen and Philip. Season three, he thought, would be about the Queen’s relationship with Harold Wilson. But I’d say what he has discovered is that it’s actually about Charles. Partly because Josh O’Connor, the actor who plays him, is so astonishingly good.”

The team has a phrase to describe the moment when one of the series’ broad themes clicks satisfyingly into place – the conflict between duty and desire, say, or the anxiety about a son’s fitness to succeed a parent. “Peter might write a massive speech overnight,” says Mackie. “And in the morning you read that and think, ‘Wow, that’s a Crown moment.’”

Morgan has become the screenwriting equivalent of a historical novelist, someone who has found his groove dramatising the events of the 20th century: The Deal tackled the bargain struck between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership; Frost/Nixon took on the famous interviews between the British journalist and the US president. And as with any self-respecting historical novelist, accuracy is important. “We really, really, really do our best,” Morgan says. “If we have something on record, if we are conscious of it, I’ll do it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Racks of period costumes, including kaftans for Margaret and suits for Anne. Photograph: Des Willie/Netflix

Five historical researchers work from a lair in the basement of Left Bank Pictures’ London offices, where they construct detailed timelines for the principal characters drawn from their library of 500 books, from cabinet papers, and from the National Archives. As the action inches forward, they also have increasing recourse to the living. Edward Millward, the academic and Plaid Cymru politician who found himself language tutor to Prince Charles in 1969, shared his old lecture notes and teaching timetables with the production; the actor playing him, Mark Lewis Jones, wore some of his old ties.

That particular episode, co-authored with playwright James Graham (Ink, This House) tells the story of the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales – digging out the narrative’s metaphorical content to make it a drama about a young man in search of a role. The metaphor is made literal: Charles is shown playing Richard II in a student production. (You would be right in thinking that the notion of him having played this flawed, sensitive, self-regarding king is too good to be true – though he did once play Macbeth at school.)

Morgan’s work, as he describes it, is to fill out the spaces between the known events, “to join the dots, to find the thread that goes between the pearls,” he says. “I make no apology for the fact that most of the time that’s intuitive. I am doing my best – I am sober and I am responsible.” At the same time, he says, the audience knows they are “not watching a documentary. They are not asking Lucian Freud to paint a picture and then judging it by its closeness to reality. They are asking, ‘What does it stir in me?’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret and Ben Daniels as Lord Snowdon. Photograph: Des Willie/Netflix

He is well aware of the possibility of his fiction’s being mistaken for fact – even of his made-up accounts shading into the factual record. He has seen it happen. In the 2006 film The Queen, Morgan invented a scene depicting Blair’s first private audience. In 2010, Blair published his autobiography. When Morgan came to read the ex-prime minister’s account of that same moment, “I remember thinking, ‘Hang on, that’s dialogue I wrote, that I didn’t get from him – so either I fluked it, clairvoyantly, or he was blurring the facts of his own memory with my fiction.’” I looked it up, and Morgan is right: the encounter described in A Journey feels remarkably similar in tone and shape to the scene in the film. Morgan argues that the relationship “between history, narrative, fact and fiction [is] so much more fluid and unreliable, but also more interesting, than anyone imagines”.

***

At Elstree Studios, the world of The Crown presents itself as a confounding, impossible geography. The backlot, which I visited in December, includes a set of carefully re-created Buckingham Palace gates, their lamps bought from the makers who supply the real palace. Beside it stands the facade of 10 Downing Street, but a truncated version; there are no upper storeys. Over the way is Aberfan village school, and a row of Glamorgan cottages, for an episode turning on the terrible disaster of 1966, when 144 people, most of them children, were killed by a collapsing coal tip.

Colman’s route to her character is instinctive. 'I can feel bogged down and panicky if I do too much research'

Nearby are the costume workshops, where designer Amy Roberts and her deputy, Sidonie Roberts, preside over Margaret’s 1970s kaftans, and a nifty suit for Geraldine Chaplin’s Duchess of Windsor. The back wall of their office is covered in images of the royals. For the memorable state occasions they re-create real outfits: the lemon ensemble the Queen wore for Prince Charles’s investiture with its curious, helmet-like headgear. Otherwise, it is a question of internalising and then playing with the royals’ style. “The Queen Mum gets stuck,” Sidonie Roberts says. “She’s found a shape – it’s a bit like a fluffy loo-roll holder – and she’s sticking with it.” Princess Anne, surprisingly chic in the late 60s, was much more fun. Roberts shows me a silk jacquard outfit in apricot and lemon for a queenly hospital visit, beautifully made, and likely to be in shot for mere seconds. “It’ll be spit and cough and then it’s all over.”

The obsessive pursuit of detail is visible everywhere you look. One morning in June I join a meeting between director Ben Caron, the show’s visual effects supervisor Ben Turner, and employees of a VFX company in London: a good 15 minutes are spent discussing the artificially created view that will be briefly glimpsed from the window of the Queen’s plane as she flies over the Welsh valleys, after her visit to Aberfan. Are the scudding clouds moving at the right speed? Could the slag heaps be better defined, to look more like slag heaps? What about dropping an extra village into the background? Should there be a couple of twinkling lights? The emphasis is on getting the landscape to echo, very precisely, the mood; Caron uses the phrase “pathetic fallacy”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The investiture of Prince Charles, played by Josh O’Connor. Photograph: Des Willie/Netflix

On another occasion, last December, Cate Hall, the hair and makeup designer, shows me the almost excessive care she has taken to assemble historical sources for her work. In her trailer at Wrotham Park, she leafs through the “bibles” she had made – photographic scrapbooks showing the month-by-month changes in the real characters’ hairstyles. “I was a bit worried I’d treated the Crown like a GCSE art project and everyone would think I was mad,” she tells me. But despite the minuteness of the research, her aim was not verisimilitude – Bonham Carter, for example, does not look much like Princess Margaret, nor ever will – but about allowing a performance to take place. “There’s an instinct and a moment when the character arrives. When she feels ‘Margarety’.”

Bonham Carter researched her role voraciously: she read everything she could lay her hands on, met Princess Margaret’s former hairdresser, who had kept a lock of her hair (“that was a bit weird”), and spoke to her friends – including the princess’s lover in the 70s, Roddy Llewellyn, a character in season three. “I consulted my aunt, who is a graphologist. And I did see a medium, sort of jokingly, about something else. And the medium said, ‘Oh yes, Margaret’s here, fingering her pearls.’” She was trying to find the princess’s essence, she tells me. “I went around trying to bottle her.”

Josh O’Connor, a wide-smiling, disarmingly enthusiastic young man who gives a remarkable performance as a volatile, emotionally immature Charles, spent a lot of time watching old footage, noting the prince’s body language and verbal tics, he tells me over coffee. He noticed, for example, that every time Charles gets out of a car, his right hand will go to each cuff, then to his breast pocket, and from there into a wave. He demonstrates: the effect is instant and uncanny. Eventually, though, “I realised I had to let go of this person who exists – or just take aspects of him so that people feel safe – and focus on the idea of a young man. A young man who is waiting for his mother to die for his life to have meaning.”

Then there was the added complication, for the older principal actors, of dealing with not just their real avatars, but their predecessors in the role. “That was the hardest bit,” Colman tells me. “For months I tried to imagine how Claire [Foy] would do it. Richard III can be played by 1,000 different actors, but she is in everyone’s immediate memory.” Unlike Bonham Carter, Colman’s route to her character is, in the end, instinctive. “I can feel bogged down and panicky and a bit giggly if I do too much research.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Colman as the Queen: ‘A very average mortal woman raised up into a goddess’. Photograph: Sophie Mutevelian/Netflix

Her Queen is a mother who finds it hard to connect with her son and heir apparent. “She is trying to get someone who is completely ill-prepared to do what he doesn’t want to do, and what she didn’t want to do either,” Colman says. All of this is somehow projected with minimal means, the reverse of her recent, Oscar-winning performance as another royal, Queen Anne in The Favourite – “lying on the floor, screaming and hitting people”. She summons up Elizabeth in her full midlife Gloriana phase: more assured, chillier than Foy’s uncertain monarch.

***

In February 2013, The Audience, a new play by Peter Morgan, premiered at the Gielgud Theatre in London. Its central idea was the weekly conversation between the Queen and the prime minister – those confidential, unminuted meetings between the head of state and its elected leader, between the monarch and a changing cast of prime ministers which seemed to say something deeply resonant about Britain itself. (There have been 14 premiers since Elizabeth II’s accession in 1952, eight of whom she has outlived; until recently, the screensaver on Morgan’s computer was a 1985 photograph of her surrounded by the survivors.) The Queen, as a line in the play has it, provided “an unbroken line, the constant presence” around which a story could be fleshed out.

From this non-linear, non-realist play came the stately march through time that is The Crown. But while whole scenes from The Audience crop up in The Crown, Morgan’s story is no longer about an encounter, but about a country. The backdrop of history gives the show the epic sweep and magnificence that are so essential to its enjoyment: early seasons had Suez and the Profumo affair; series three will have the moon landings and the devaluation of the pound. It’s a very particular kind of history, though, seen entirely through the eyes of its principal characters. This is a world in which the prime minister barely enters parliament; a world in which the three-day week and electricity shortages of the early 70s are shown by a palace lit by twinkling candles.

The Crown is not the place to come if you are looking for a critique of the British monarchy. It is a curious experience, being drawn into the show as someone who objects to inherited privilege and the shameful trappings of empire. The show’s charismatic actors humanise its characters, taking our attention away from the structural context. The screenplay can also lighten the bleakness of real events; the compelling episode about Prince Charles’s investiture does not show us the real bombs that exploded in Wales in protest at the arrival of the English imperialist oppressor. Season three is set in an era of counterculture, of grassroots political ferment – but this barely registers, beyond Princess Margaret’s forays into posh bohemianism. The world of The Crown is burnished, a brighter version of the real, just as Mad Men was a more perfect, gleaming version of office life in 1960s New York. I watched parts of The Crown while reading The Quest For Queen Mary – a volume of notes James Pope-Hennessy made in the early 1950s while working on the official biography of the Queen’s grandmother. Visiting Balmoral, Pope-Hennessy notices yellow patches on the carpet – and immediately realises that they are piss stains, courtesy of the royal Corgis. There are no piss-stained carpets in The Crown.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest On set with Helena Bonham Carter. Photograph: Des Willie/Netflix

Caron tells me that his earliest, 90-minute cut of the Aberfan episode – with its profoundly affecting material about a mining community turned upside down by an unspeakable tragedy – “was like a Ken Loach film”. It was, of course, re-edited: social-realism wasn’t the point at all. However respectful the makers were determined to be to the people of Aberfan, the point was to tell a story about the Queen and the crown.

Visiting the shoots at Winchester and Wrotham Park, I meet a man whom everyone on the show calls “Major David”, a nattily dressed figure in tweeds and a tie. David Rankin-Hunt, CVO MBE KCN TD, is The Crown’s dispenser of wisdom on matters royal, including bowing and curtseying and the fact that the Queen would never, ever say “cheers” when raising her glass (she would say absolutely nothing). Rankin-Hunt knows about protocol because he has lived it: he spent 33 years working in the royal household organising, among other things, state funerals. He also occupies a post called the Norfolk Herald Extraordinary and can be seen processing in medieval finery on royal occasions. “Before taking up the role on The Crown I was anxious to get the approval of the Palace,” he tells me. “Which I obtained.”

He has no idea whether the Queen watches the show, though he says he is sure that other family members do. “Very senior members of the royal household have said to me, ‘Oh, we love The Crown.’ If there were some indication from on high that it was some kind of scandalous production, that might be reflected in their view, don’t you think?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Creator Peter Morgan: ‘I am dealing with archetypes that are more suitable to Greek tragedy.’ Photograph: Camera Press

As far as Morgan is concerned, The Crown is not really about the royal family on any fundamental level. “I am dealing with archetypes that are more suitable to Greek tragedy,” he tells me. “Fathers and mothers, gods and goddesses, mothers and sons. Betrayals. The fact that we raise up a very average mortal woman into a goddess.”

It is the drama that is the point, not the monarchy, Caron argues. “I don’t think the mafia is a great thing. Nor do lots of people. But lots of people watch The Sopranos because they are fascinated by Tony Soprano and his family relationships, and because the stakes in the story are massive.” (As it happens, The Crown has been repeatedly compared to a mafia drama in which the Queen is at first a reluctant, then a ruthless capo at the head of a hierarchical family structure.)

And yet: Morgan’s characters are not the fictional Soprano family, nor characters from Greek myth, but real and (mostly) living people. It is a measure of The Crown’s proximity to the crown that, Morgan tells me, he meets members of the royal household four times a year – “people who are very high-ranking and very active within the organisation” – and, “respectfully, I tell them what I have in mind, and they brace themselves slightly”. But only slightly.

***

The royal family presents itself as a kind of prefabricated national fiction. The make-believe of monarchy may be of the institution’s own making – the smoke and mirrors of ritual and ceremony – or it may be moulded by the media. “It is riveting how much inventiveness exists. People create scenarios and write scripts for strange almost-plays,” Prince Charles once told his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby.

The royal family has been fictionalised countless times: there is Sue Townsend’s The Queen And I, which imagines the royal family living on a council estate; or Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, in which the Queen becomes a voracious consumer of novels. Or his play A Question Of Attribution, about an imaginary encounter between the monarch and Anthony Blunt, the surveyor of the Queen’s pictures and a KGB spy. Almost every British fictional treatment of the royals sits on a spectrum between gentle humour and biting satire. The Crown is different: it is not funny.

O’Connor will do Charles 'so much good', Bonham Carter predicts. 'It’s interesting, the interplay with reality, as PR'

“You know when you get a supermarket trolley that veers to one side, because its wheels aren’t right?” Morgan says. “The wheels on this show want it to do satire, which is what we love doing with our political leaders and royals. But I’m not remotely interested in that. I’m constantly trying to steer it in the other direction – towards something heroic.”

Treating the characters satirically would be like playing the piano with only one hand, he says. “But if you dare to take them and their predicaments more seriously and dare to see them within a tradition of a different kind of drama, in which you explore the complexity of their internal lives, and their struggle against what is expected, and the fact that their smallest steps can have national or international consequences, then suddenly you open up the possibilities of playing the piano with two, or even four hands, and with all of that tonal range.”

This is despite Morgan’s own encounters with the real-life ridiculousness of royal pomp, which he witnessed firsthand in 2016 when he received a CBE from Prince Charles. “I spent my whole time giggling,” he says. “There were grown men with spurs and breastplates wandering around and talking to each other seriously. It was beyond a theme park.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Josh O’Connor as Prince Charles and Emerald Fennell as Camilla Shand. Photograph: Colin Hutton/Netflix

In this royal world of fictions and theme parks, where “reality” is strangely elusive, The Crown, which is not a “strange almost-play” but a particularly skilful and highly polished drama, cannot help but affect the way that the royal family is seen. The more the actors imbue their characters with intriguing, flawed complexity, the more charismatic and attractive they make their real counterparts appear.

O’Connor “is going to do Charles so much good”, Bonham Carter predicts. “He’s got so much charm and sensitivity. It’s so interesting, the interplay of this series with reality, as PR.” Morgan tells me, too, that Tobias Menzies’ performance “will do a lot of good for Prince Philip. Because Prince Philip is not considered a complex person.” The Crown is “spiky – it punches and pokes and digs at the royal family, it doesn’t hug them,” Morgan says. But nor does it put them on trial. “It’s my job to slightly spare their dignity.”

I’m no monarchist, but at times I have felt, over the past two or three years, that the Queen is the only thing holding this country together, even as the current prime minister attempts to manipulate the constitution for his own ends. The traditional royal virtues – dullness, stability – have their appeal, despite everything. When Britain is a confusing and fragmented place, The Crown’s stately, touching progress is deeply reassuring: it goes on and on, just as the Queen has done for the lifetimes of nearly all of us. With its tragic, larger-than-life characters, The Crown represents a fading dream of something that never quite existed. It is also a kind of talisman against Elizabeth’s death. As Colman tells me, “We’ll all be at sea when we don’t have the Queen.”

• The Crown season three begins on 17 November.

• This article was amended on 9 September 2019 to clarify that the whole of season three, not just the first episode, covers the period between Wilson’s election in 1964 and the silver jubilee of 1977.

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