While the social set-up was different in England, the court never quite the same magnet, nevertheless here too conditions must have been pretty cheek-by-jowl, particularly in unreconstructed Windsor. Formality there was (too much of it, the courtiers complained), but, with a crowd of well-to-do people crammed together in a tight place, etiquette was always under strain, and once the door closed on the King and Queen, the relief must have been as palpable as it is in the film; the royal brothers sink thankfully onto the vacated thrones and take off their shoes, and poor pregnant Lady Townsend is at last permitted to sit down. In the first version of the script I wanted to emphasise the unbuttoning that occurred once the King and Queen left the room by having Fitzroy unexpectedly return; the court is suddenly stunned back into silence and immobility, thinking Their Majesties are about to come back; however, Fitzroy is only retrieving a shawl the Queen has left, so the hubbub resumes. Revising the script, I could see that there would be no time for such underlining and it was an early cut.

‘No time’ is, of course, always the problem. Film is drama at its most impatient, ‘What happens next?’ the perpetual nag. One can never hang about, thinks the writer, petulantly. There’s a bit more leeway on stage, depending on the kind of story one’s telling, and more still on television, where the viewers are so close to the characters as not to mind whether they dawdle a bit. But with film, meandering is out of the question; it has to be brisk, so most of my atmospheric backstairs stuff never made it to the final film – so little, in fact, that I wonder now how I could ever have thought it would, and was that preamble to the script just a sales pitch?

Not really, as the odd glimpses of life behind the scenes that did make it to the screen do pay off. There is the cupboard in the wall opened by the distraught King to reveal his three pages sleeping stacked on shelves one above the other (like the Fettiplaces on their monument in Swinbrook church in Oxfordshire). The King dashes along a vaulted corridor (Broughton Castle), bursts in upon a sleeping lady-in-waiting and demands her chamber pot. ‘Do it, England,’ he adjures himself, ‘do it.’

But time and the budget put paid to much of the rest … no back corridors thronged with courtiers, still primping and titivating themselves as they hurry down to the opening concert; no shot of the same corridors silent in the small hours as one by one the doors open and sleepy courtiers stumble out en déshabille to listen to the distant howling of the King. The loss of such scenes was a sacrifice but they were cut with resignation and general agreement, the telling of the King’s story always taking priority and so edging out some of these nice vignettes.