Why King Charles has many reasons to be positive as he celebrates 74th birthday - Jayne Dowle

His visit last week to our own region must have shown King Charles that despite the ill-judged actions of one individual - a protestor who threw an egg in York - there is an enormous swell of public goodwill towards him, and a general feeling that most of us simply want him to succeed in the role he has spent a lifetime waiting to embrace.

With spectacular timing, the visit took place just as the new series of The Crown, debuted on Netflix, starring suave Sheffield-born actor Dominic West as the then-Prince Charles, an eerily uncanny Elizabeth Debicki as the Princess of Wales and Imelda Staunton as a stoic late Elizabeth II.

Unless you’ve been on Mars for the last few months, you’ll probably know that there’s been a right old Royal hullabaloo about the veracity of this season five, which covers the ‘difficult years’ between 1991/2 and 1997, when three of the Queen’s children, Charles, Anne and Andrew, divorced their spouses, Windsor Castle suffered a catastrophic fire and John Major (played by a spectacularly well-cast Jonny Lee Miller) led a Conservative government mired in scandal and split over Europe.

Some things never change, others have undergone an almost revolutionary volte face. In 1992, when William and Harry were still running around in short trousers, who would have ever imagined that just five years later their mother would be dead in a Paris underpass, and they would forever sear themselves on the public conscience when they followed her coffin to Westminster Abbey?

I think most of us Royal-watchers, even then, knew that William would marry a nice, dependable girl and accept his fate as heir to the throne.

But I can’t say anyone would have ever placed his younger brother as living in California with a former actress, or predicted that his actions in the aftermath of that splendid wedding at Windsor Castle would end up almost shattering into pieces the family he was born into.

With the passing of the Queen in September, this was always going to be a period of reflection, and eventually acceptance that things will never be the same again. And this includes the natural deference that most of us felt towards the monarch, especially as she celebrated her Platinum Jubilee.

However, the successful visit of the new King to Yorkshire, coinciding as it does with this controversial new series of The Crown, reminds us that we’re heralding a new relationship with the institution that dominates so much of our national culture and character.

This is a good thing. It might be a painful transition, but it is a worthwhile one. And dare I say it, if you do decide to watch this new series of The Crown, you’ll find it prompts far more questions than it answers.

I know not everyone will agree with me; but please be aware that I do remain entirely respectful of her late Majesty, who was such a rock, right up to the end. It’s just that any debate about how she affected her family, as a wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother, has until now tended to end up either silenced or grossly polarised.

When you’re such a public figure, nuances and sensitivities can so easily be blurred in the bigger picture. Whilst The Crown’s writer, Peter Morgan, has been castigated for embroidering, even inventing, incidents, leading to calls for the new series to be held, if not shelved, the more controversial elements of The Crown do at least serve a positive purpose.

If we find ourselves debating whether the then-Prince Charles really did dance with glee at a national newspaper poll which found him, in the drama at least, to be far more popular than his mother, then at least we are engaging with the subject and actually discussing it.

Keen Royal historians – and appalled loyal monarchists - are sharing their observations all over social media, pinning precise dates to specific happenings and arguing what is ‘true’ and what is not.

And whilst some of the more extreme re-imaginings of real events may even cause distress to the still-living individuals featured in them, the point is that such heated debate is ultimately serving a positive purpose. It helps us all to separate fact from fiction, and to decide for ourselves what we wish to believe.

Even during the tumultuous events of recent years, we’ve never really had the opportunity to do this in such depth. But if we are to understand our monarchy we must all question, think, debate and then reflect.