TOM EATON | ‘The Crown’, like the royal family, is too good to be true

Suddenly, The Crown is everywhere, ushering popular culture away from The Real Housewives and lip-syncing children on Tik Tok and inviting it, very politely, into a claustrophobically hot tearoom in which everyone is wearing three overcoats and admiring an embroidered doily commemorating the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt.

Of course, I understand the lure of lush escapism, where the only class conflict is whether you have all the money or merely a huge amount of it. But that doesn’t explain why the current season seems to have outdone its three predecessors by taking on a life of its own beyond the conventional silo of streamed television.

One explanation might be political.

Last year Telegraph columnist Charles Moore went so far as to opine that the newly-cast Olivia Colman wasn’t suited to play the queen because she has “a distinctly leftwing face”.

There is projection and then there is the overheated IMAX projector of Mr Moore’s psyche, but perhaps the show has attracted new, Telegraph-reading viewers, eager to check if Colman’s magical face does, in fact, lurch leftward, dragged in that direction by the cultural Marxism that, as an artist, she must obviously live by.

It’s also possible that a different audience has been lured in by the interesting decision to have Margaret Thatcher portrayed by former X-Files star Gillian Anderson, who has now played an object of fascination to a generation of young men who worry about aliens taking over their world, and also FBI agent Dana Scully.

I suspect, however, the real attraction is the one summarised by a Vulture headline: “The Crown has finally gotten to the good stuff.” At last, the subtext seems to be, the series is getting stuck into some properly voyeuristic kitchen sink drama, even if the sink is made of gold and is clogged with corgi hair and long, portentous establishing shots.

So yes, perhaps there are good reasons why The Crown is everywhere. But what is less clear is why so many people are now asking if it’s “true”.

I didn’t scream, of course, mostly because I wouldn’t have been heard over the ringing of cellphones and happy conversations of the people around me in the cinema.

Don’t get me wrong. I like me some historical accuracy. As cinemagoers cheered during the climax of Christopher Nolan’s “accurate” “history” of Dunkirk, I was the guy wanting to scream: “Wait, did anyone else just see a Spitfire, in a gentle horizontal glide because it’s run out of petrol, with no airspeed and less altitude, shoot down a German dive-bomber hurtling towards Kenneth Branagh at 400km/h?”

I didn’t scream, of course, mostly because I wouldn’t have been heard over the ringing of cellphones and happy conversations of the people around me in the cinema. But mostly I don’t protest because, despite my tooth-gnashing, I accept that films and television are not archaeological artefacts.

No matter how “true” or “accurate” they claim to be, they can only ever be a representation, framed by the tastes and mores of the day, of a general consensus about a series of events which may (or may not) have made their way into the public domain, having first been worked over by lawyers, paper shredders, more lawyers and finally accountants.

I think most people know this deep down. They know that if Robin Hood existed, he didn’t speak with an American accent. They suspect that D-Day didn’t happen in 170 minutes, or that it was planned to coincide with Tom Hanks’ realisation that he needed to sacrifice himself for Matt Damon.

And yet every day I see another headline asking: “How accurate is The Crown?” which makes me ask in turn: why? And why now?

Again, politics might have a role. It’s possible that, as the far left and far right become indistinguishable, bellowing at us that social collapse in Venezuela is a triumph of socialism and that denying the results of a legitimate election in the US is how patriots take a stand against tyranny, more people are groping for a middle ground that feels faintly objective and where facts, not feelings, hold sway.

It’s also possible that a great many younger people, having missed Dianamania the first time around, are now getting their first dose of Blair-era reginaphobia, glaring at Olivia Colman’s left-leaning face and wondering how those Windsors could be so beastly.

But I think mostly people are looking for truth because the sheer permanence of the Windsors seems so absurdly unlikely in this endlessly teetering, temporary world.

There is not one human alive on this planet who knows a time before the queen’s father. Just two generations of this strange family have straddled our world like minor gods on Olympus, if there had been a god of shaking hands and a god of etiquette, possibly married to the god of appropriate cutlery.

So is any of it true? Absolutely. Probably. Perhaps. No. And yet on they go, waving and shaking hands ...