Princess Margaret: The Rebel Royal
BBC TWO, 9.00PM
One of the more striking features of Netflix’s The Crown was its startlingly fresh and captivating portrayal of Princess Margaret and the significance that the Group Captain Peter Townsend affair had on her early years. It was pretty much inevitable that other reassessments would follow, such as this two-part documentary exploring how the Princess’s life and loves reflected, in part at least, the wider social and sexual revolution that was transforming British society in the mid to latter part of the 20th century.
After an oddly scant account of her childhood and her relationship with elder sister Elizabeth, most of the focus in this opening part is on how she developed her un-royal interests in fashion and the arts, and on her marriage to the hip young Sixties photographer Antony Armstrong-jones – the first non-aristocrat to marry into the Royal family in 400 years. It is an interesting if underwhelming portrait, with a good balance of contributors, from old friends and acquaintances to biographers and academics – and some nice animated sequences to break up the less scintillating parts of her life story. Gerard O’donovan