No shelter from the reign

THE Queen may have had a grim few months but I’d argue she’s had grimmer. Most notably, the whole of 1992, the year she’d go on to describe as her “annus horribilis”. Andrew split from Fergie, Anne divorced Mark and Diana’s misery was splashed across front pages worldwide, culminating in December’s announcement that she and Charles would be going their separate ways.

And that’s without even mentioning the blaze that ripped through Windsor Castle, destroying more than 100 rooms.

Lesser souls would have thrown in the towel, I’m sure, but hers is a job that really doesn’t give you that option. Not the way she sees it.

Episode three of INSIDE THE CROWN: SECRETS OF THE ROYALS (ITV, 9pm) recalls the biggest trials and tribulations Her Majesty has had to face throughout her reign, from family crises to moments when the nation has turned to her for comfort and celebrates the fact that, for the most part, she’s handled these admirably.

I say “for the most part”, because she hasn’t always got it right, particularly to begin with.

Netflix’s royal drama The Crown, for example, devotes an entire episode to the Aberfan Colliery disaster of October 1966, in which 116 children and 28 adults lost their lives, and portrays the Queen as having misjudged quite woefully what this devastated community expected from her.

Like much of that drama, it paints a somewhat mischievously distorted picture but there’s no denying she was wrong to wait a week before visiting, as she’d later privately acknowledge.

Tonight’s programme recalls the death of Princess Diana in August 1997, the royals’ initial lack of response to which left many people outraged.

The Queen soon won them round, of course but then this was before the days of social media.

Would she have coped so easily now, I wonder, when faced with the fleck-mouthed fury of the Twitter mob?

Elsewhere, DEATH IN PARADISE (BBC1, 9pm) welcomes a new officer to the island. But Ralf Little’s DI Neville

Parker, of Manchester Police, doesn’t plan to stay long.

He’s flown in merely to complete the necessary paperwork following the apparent suicide of a fellow Mancunian. Plus he doesn’t like sunshine.

“I’m not very good away from home,” he insists, sounding uncannily like Norwich City’s defence.

The trouble is he starts to suspect this woman was actually murdered (a conclusion, of course, to which he could as easily have drawn by watching any of the previous 68 episodes).

So it seems he’ll have to stick around after all, just for now…