The Crown
Netflix

What is the Queen really like? What is it really like to be the Queen? These are the endlessly fascinating if ultimately unanswerable questions at the heart of The Crown, the third series of which is now streaming on Netflix.

Peter Morgan’s sensitive, respectful, completely compelling drama unfolds the Queen’s 60-year reign, decade by tumultuous decade, the monarch there at the centre and yet at the same time not quite there. Claire Foy, who so brilliantly played the young queen, has now given way to Olivia Colman as Elizabeth enters middle age. It is 1964 and Harold Wilson, the Labour dark horse, has been elected prime minister and is about to have his first audience with the Queen; Prince Philip, now played by Tobias Menzies, is fulminating about rumours circulating that Wilson is a KGB spy.

As it turns out, the spy was even closer to home: in Buckingham Palace itself no less, in the shape of Sir Anthony Blunt (played by Samuel West), the keeper of the Queen’s Pictures.