Did any of this actually happen? The Crown, season four, reviewed

‘We have to stop it now!’ says Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), smoking another cigarette, obviously. She’s talking about the impending royal wedding between her nephew Charles and a pretty but gauche young thing called Lady Diana Spencer. Spoiler alert: none of the family will listen.

Yes, The Crown is back on Netflix for its fourth season, and naturally I skipped straight to the episode that will be of most interest to everyone: the royal engagement and its aftermath. Why is this subject so grimly, pruriently, enduringly fascinating? Because even though it really did happen and many of us remember it vividly, it yet has the fantastical implausibility of the kind of stories we read as children: Cinderella meets the macabre tale (‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold’) of Mr Fox maybe.

Quite often when watching The Crown I find myself wanting to shout at the screen: ‘That never happened, you bloody pinko troublemaker.’ At the same time, though, you’ve got to hand it to screenwriter Peter Morgan, he does know how to wring out every last drop of psychological drama from stories with which we might otherwise feel overfamiliar.

Worldly, sexy, redolent of country sports and rogering, Camilla is everything the fawn Diana is not

There’s a scene, for example, where Diana — then a kittenish 19-year-old — interrupts Princess Margaret, mid-anecdote, as she’s regaling the senior royals with a yarn about Imelda Marcos, and finds herself in an H.M. Bateman-esque etiquette scene from hell. To whom does she curtsey first? Well, the Queen obviously. But who takes precedence after that? ‘Don’t curtsey to her. She’s not royal. Just grand,’ sneers Margaret, as the helpless Diana whirls round looking for guidance from the frosty, unsympathetic faces. Charles, who ought to be gallantly rescuing his fiancée at this point, is, of course, perfectly useless.