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Claire Foy in The Crown on Netflix.
Claire Foy, ‘beyond outstanding’ in The Crown on Netflix. Photograph: Stuart Hendry/Netflix
Claire Foy, ‘beyond outstanding’ in The Crown on Netflix. Photograph: Stuart Hendry/Netflix

The week in TV: The Crown; Invasion! With Sam Willis; Peaky Blinders; The A-Word

This article is more than 6 years old
Claire Foy excels in the Netflix drama’s second series, Cillian Murphy’s gang are back in force, and BBC1’s autism drama is superbly smart

We still have a little time to wait for Olivia Colman’s much-heralded appearance as the middle-aged Queen in The Crown, though it’s hard to see how even she could match Claire Foy’s perfectly pitched performances so far. In the meantime, the second 10-part season was released on Friday, and… could it match season the first, which bestrode the world? I am here to happily report that, if anything, it’s better.

As ever, creator Peter Morgan’s trademark mix of scrupulous research, informed speculation and a 10% seasoning of wholly unverifiable scuttlebutt leads to immense events being dramatised in very human form. As ever, it’s not all about pomp, pageantry and deference – though we get our little gullet-load of that – but about history, our history, during the chunk of years that ushered in the modern Britain.

I suspect we’re all a little obsessed with the decade immediately preceding our own births: old history is just that, but that particular span seems tantalisingly close yet wholly unknowable. The second season kicks off with the Suez crisis of 1956 – a mild pity Morgan didn’t have room for the crucial part played by the Observer via David Astor’s courageous leader, which almost broke the commercial kneecaps of the paper, but I suppose there was, for Morgan, quite a big-ass slice of other history to cram in – and ends with the 1964 birth of Prince Edward. It simply flies along, racing, as it is in the new television age, from Egypt to Paris, Soho to Washington, Ghana to the Kremlin, via the Melbourne Olympics, Antarctica and Princess Margaret’s overstuffed ashtray.

The whole season keeps a lickety-split pace pretty much throughout. The only episode that flags even slightly covers a visit by Billy Graham, in which the superevangelist gets a remarkable two private audiences. But even this is almost wholly redeemed by focusing on Her Maj’s troubled conscience regarding forgiveness of her uncle David, the disgraced abdicator the Duke of Windsor, angling for re-entry to “the firm” from his desultory, hate-filled exile in Paris. And my, what a limp, wheedling, snobbish snivelweasel of a man he was; I hadn’t truly realised the extent of his wartime treachery (according to this show), selling secrets to the Nazis, which meant, effectively, that the blitz killed many more Londoners than it need have: these people who once acclaimed the wretched man as their king. Alex Jennings is a brave actor to will so much opprobrium on his head.

Claire Foy and Matt Smith in The Crown. Photograph: Netflix

There are two standout hours, I think: poor Charles at Gordonstoun – I’ve only ever had one royal soft spot, and it’s for him, and I suspect after this you will too – and the one featuring the story of Lord Altrincham (later to disclaim his title and become the journalist John Grigg), who hears, from a dentist’s waiting room, a particularly poor, borderline patronising radio broadcast from the palace. No republican, he’s dismayed at the sneers from the waiting room. The peasants are revolting. And he rushes back to bash out, still with toothache, a denunciatory tract for his own little magazine, lambasting the Queen for being a strangulated throwback in a fast-changing age. Invited first to an interview with Robin Day, then for another at the palace itself, he argues in both cases with courtesy, respect, intelligence and some damned fine points, and changed even royal minds.

His interventions led, among other changes, to the televising of the Christmas broadcast and the ending of the ludicrous debs’ coming-out ball. In such increments we can see, and reluctantly appreciate, the canny machine that has operated on behalf of, and at the occasional specific request of, the Queen to keep the monarchy not just alive but, arguably, never more revered than today. The machinations are given a nice personal commentary in the form of debates between Elizabeth, trying as hard as anyone in those fantasy castles – it’s no coincidence, I suspect, that so much time is spent at Sandringham, Windsor and Balmoral, rather than the bland chintz mausoleum that is Buck House – ever could to emphasise, no matter how laughably ineffectually, with changing times, and her appalling snob of a mother, pickled in Teutonic amber.

Crucially, Foy as Elizabeth is quite beyond outstanding. Impossibly clipped, lifelong sensible as gumboots in the rain, relatively uneducated and unimaginative, strangely baffled by her own jealousies – of Jackie Kennedy, of Philip’s relative freedom – she still steps up to her many crises with a backbone of titanium. It’s a towering performance, as, in their smaller ways, are Vanessa Kirby as the glorious, demeaned Margaret, Anton Lesser as the cuckold Harold MacMillan; Matthew Goode as the sleazeball Antony Armstrong-Jones. While having absolutely no time for the monarchy myself, or more accurately, for the spirit of hagiographic media drool that accompanies its every engagement, birth, cough, spit or fart, I can also learn to respect some folk just doing a job that never ends. In particular the backstory of Philip, as played here by the revelation that is the truculent, slab-faced Matt Smith, both fascinates and appals: the Nazi sisters, the exile from war-ravaged Greece, the long battles against the constraining “moustaches” of the palace, the lifelong condemnation of a ravenously free spirit to a non-job, yet the constancy, when tamed, of his devotion to his wife. I met the real Philip once, at a Duke of Edinburgh’s award thing, and, while still an ardent, not to say fleck-lipped, republican, can now think myself privileged to have shaken his hand. Thus can television change minds.

Adrien Brody, ‘mesmerising’ in the new series of Peaky Blinders on BBC Two. Photograph: Robert Viglasky/BBC/Caryn Mandabach

Sadly, I don’t think Sam Willis will be doing much of that in Invasion!. This could have been a timely reminder, amid the ongoing gigglefest that is the bleary shambles of Brexit, of how we are, if nothing else, a highly mongrel nation. There were decent snatches of explanation – the farming invasion, the foodie invasion (the Romans basically overwhelmed us through sly use of victuals that tasted of something other than mud) – yet it was wholly rum, falling short of BBC Four’s high historical standards.

Apart from that misjudged exclamation mark in the title, Mr Willis simply tried too hard to be endearing, to inject “fun”. So we saw him quoting Churchill beside… a statue of Churchill. Or, I don’t know, saying something about the white cliffs of Dover, standing atop… I’ll let you guess. BBC Four usually gets this so right: just lets a few talking heads explain things, wisely, without exclamation marks or general gussying-up: this felt like Johnny Noakes getting too excited about the Vikings, with memories of Blue Peter’s traditional awful drawings. Odd.

A searing episode of Peaky Blinders saw Cillian Murphy, “cooped up like a wasp in a beer glass”, besieged back in Small Heath by mafia to the left of him, family betrayals to the right, his own long-forgotten communist conscience marching down the middle. As usual, Tommy Shelby’s coping strategy consisted of distractions – gin-making, boxing, copulation – punctuated with seconds of cathartic violence. Adrien Brody, as the emphysemic Sicilian, might be in line for the award of most overcooked ham in the Christmas hamper, but it’s still a mesmerising performance: all is shaping up thrillingly.

As The A Word keeps shaping up, intelligently, to become perhaps the most valuable treatment of autism rendered on screen. Occasionally drama can do this: enlighten, teach, in a way even the wisest of scientific documentaries cannot. This series, with its focus on the terribly human frailties – and prejudices, bickerings, gallumphing misunderstandings, sudden laughter and sudden hot tears – a diagnosis can bring, somehow manages to marvel, to confuse, to lead one to quiet despair in equal measure. The acting is uniformly splendid; much has been rightly made of Max Vento as young Joe, but Molly Wright as sister Becky is surely on course for a gloried career.

Someone won The X Factor last weekend. The final was watched by a relatively paltry 4.4 million, compared with an audience of 9.9 million for Strictly Come Dancing. Time to put a bolt through its head?

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