David Behrens: Spare a thought for the Royals and enjoy the Queen's Speech

I am agnostic on the question of royalty; I like the tradition but not the privilege and entitlement that accompanies it.

But I defy anyone who has watched The Crown, the current TV series about the Queen’s reign, not to feel at least a little compassion for the Royal family. It’s quite possible that you are not among its viewers, for The Crown is on Netflix and is delivered via the internet, not over the air.

But it is as outstanding a work as anything you will have seen this year – not for its sumptuous and reportedly vastly expensive production values but for its storytelling, and in particular its ability to weave what we knew with what we didn’t.

Its creator, Peter Morgan, is perhaps our greatest living dramatist.

The programme’s triumph is to resurrect forgotten or misunderstood chapters of our recent past and to view them through the prism of the Palace. It ought to be required viewing for every GCSE history class.

Some of the characters emerge very badly – the obsequious courtiers and the Nazi-leaning Duke of Windsor, whom Morgan somehow sympathetically eviscerates – yet the series does more to humanise and make less distant the inner Royals than anything before it. In our house, even Mrs B, who would have made Lenin look like a royalist, was moved to something approaching empathy.

I grew up watching my grandmother and others of her generation genuflect to the Royals. “Ooh, look at her hat,” she would say whenever the Queen appeared on black-and-white TV, and a debate would ensue as to what colour it might be. I’m sure the commentator would have said, but his voice would have been drowned by hers. “It doesn’t go with that jacket. It’s not like the nice tweed one she wore at Caernarvon.”

My own indifference to such matters was forged in 1977 when I was sent by my newspaper to cover the Silver Jubilee celebrations. They would, in an age of discontent, be a damp squib, I thought, but I was confounded when an older generation literally draped the streets in a sea of red, white and blue. It was an excuse for a party, right enough, but it was also a nod to a set of values they were not ready to let go of.

I was lucky, incidentally, not to have been bundled off to the Tower that year. Arriving at a tractor factory in Bradford where Princess Anne was to touch down, I misread a policeman’s directions and drove my battered Mini straight on to the helicopter pad.

Retribution came a few days later, when I sat down at a dinner at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds at which the Duke of Edinburgh was to speak, and a waiter missed the plate and ladled minestrone soup into my lap.

It is startling, looking back, at how loose the security was in those days. As a junior member of the Royal rota at a regional command performance, I was permitted to get within earshot of the family as they chatted backstage with Arthur Askey, Harry Worth and someone with his arm inside Basil Brush. Arthur Askey shook my hand, mistaking me, I fear, for a trailing member of the Royal party.

Maybe it’s age that has softened me – I can’t be far off that of my grandmother when the Queen wore her tweed jacket – but I sensed a softening in our national disregard this year. Perhaps Mr Morgan played a part in this but mostly it was to be seen in the reaction to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s engagement.

Wherever you sit on the monarchy debate, it would be simply mean-spirited not to take pleasure in the happiness of two decent and clearly in-love young people, one of whom had just marked the 20th anniversary of the loss of his mother. It is no less than we would wish for our own children.

Their wedding on cup final day in May is an event we can all embrace – not just because it will allow the world to admire what we so often disparage, but also because it is something the Government will be quite unable to upstage by calling another snap election.

And so, for a few minutes on Christmas afternoon, the Queen will hold sway in the Behrens household before its inhabitants remember what Christmas is really about, and begin arguing over who will have custody of the remote control.