It’s Downton-style telly but reveals the real Queen Victoria

O, NO prizes for guessing where we’re all going to be this Sunday evening at 9pm, is there? Glued to our tellies, that’s where. The new ITV series Victoria kicks off then with Jenna Coleman (Doctor Who’s Clara to you) as the young Victoria and — be still my beating heart! — Rufus Sewell as her ageing, worldly prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who has a bit of a thing for the young queen. And next Sunday it’ll go head to head against Poldark. Tricky.

The series occupies, obviously, the Sunday-evening Downton slot, without the shame. This is costume drama, only it’s history, so it’s respectable, see? It’s got a good, entirely fictional, Upstairs Downstairs narrative going (spoiler: the housekeeper and butler at Buck House are flogging the Queen’s old gloves and wax candles for sordid gain) — as well as the actual history.

And the history is sound; the adviser to the series being A N Wilson, whose admirable biography of the monarch underpins the whole thing. As he observes, the series “restores the real thing”, that is to say, the real Victoria, rather than the imagined one.

That’s a necessary exercise. There are a number of reasons why our perceptions of Victoria, perhaps the most important woman in English history, are so wildly at odds with reality.

One problem is that the remaking of Victoria’s image began right after her death, when her son B er tie, who detested her, went through her papers and possessions, destroying anything that he didn’t like the look of.

The other is that our concept of Victoria is obscured by Victorianism. That is to say, we project all our prejudices about the a ge — p u r i t a n i c a l , j i n go i s t i c , hidebound about sex — on to the woman who gave her name to it. Yet almost none of these things is true of Vic toria, especially in her youth.

Like the young Jane Austen, she was in fact a child of the Regency era. Her royal uncles’ home lives — only one of them features in the programme — were rackety, with their irregular unions blessed with umpteen bastard children. Victoria grew up in a period that was unprudish about sex, though that’s not wholly evident here.

There are other ways in which this series is a useful corrective to our misperceptions about Victoria. For one thing, she’s young when we meet her: Jenna Coleman is in fact 30 (and, with her Cara Delevingne eyebrows much prettier than the original), but she is convincing as the young queen at 18, which is when she succeeded to the throne. She looks insecure and vulnerable at her coronation: as she was. There’s also a palpable sense of her humour here in her relationship with Lord Melbourne — she was a woman who could be very much amused.

Our image of Victoria is of a rather terrifying old lady, which is how she ended up at the end of her long life, but we forget that at the start of her reign she was utterly unprepared for her role. She seems taken aback when she gives orders to her elders, and they obey her. She still plays with her doll.

Before she succeeded to the throne she shared a room with her mother. And she was, in fact, culpably unworldly about politics and the court. That ignorance c an be attributed to the so - c alled Kensington system, under which she was educated, whereby her upbringing