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St James’s Palace. 1953. A dynamic Duke of Edinburgh is relishing a ding-dong with the antediluvian fossils of the Coronation Committee. He wants to embrace modernity by allowing the BBC to televise the ceremony. The ‘grey old men’ want to continue doing things in exactly the same way that they have been done since 1066. Modernity prevails and the coronation is the biggest television spectacular there has been.

This episode, splendidly recreated with a little artistic licence in The Crown, Netflix’s epic about the Queen, was a tipping point in terms of the public’s acceptance of the medium of television. Many viewers acquired their first sets for the sole purpose of watching the coronation.

Now, in the television world, the wind of change is rising again. We might come to regard The Crown itself as another tipping point: marking the watershed moment when power began to ebb from the once-mighty BBC drama department to young pretenders such as Netflix and Amazon.

According to industry gossip, writer Peter Morgan penned a couple of episodes on spec and took them to the BBC. The corporation loved it but simply couldn’t afford to make it. Netflix stepped in and ordered two seasons for a reported £100 million. The Beeb’s entire annual drama budget is estimated to be around £220 million.

Reviewing The Crown in The Spectator two weeks ago, James Delingpole suggested that readers should ‘subscribe to Netflix asap …and give up on terrestrial TV altogether’ — and ever-growing numbers are doing just that.

More than a quarter of the adult population of Britain now subscribe to video streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon. And almost half of those subscribers — some six million people — say they now rarely watch normal TV any more.

And why would they, when the streaming services have the likes of Stranger Things, The Night Of and Westworld, as well as old favourites such as Veep, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.