Given my royalist inclinations, I haven’t followed the goings-on over the break-up of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, or read any of the literature it has occasioned. I don’t say this prissily. In my own circle of friends divorce dismays me for entirely selfish reasons: it alters the social landscape in unpredictable ways, curtailing friendships, shutting down havens and generally making life less comfortable. The Prince of Wales’s marriage, I need hardly add, does not impinge in quite this way, but like everything to do with the monarchy I’d just like to be able to take it for granted as one used to do. I don’t want to have to think about it. I just want it to be there.

However, I would like to tiptoe into a royal bedroom if only to see how far, when one party is royal and the other not, the game of Grandmother’s Footsteps still goes on between the sheets. At what point is rank suspended and royalty discontinued, and is the subject, even when forgetting him/herself utterly, still obliged to remember his/her place? Toiling over that regal eminence, I can imagine Edward VIl’s mistresses still feeling constrained to call him ‘sir’, and without their ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ royals may feel too naked altogether. Though maybe the discarding of this last rag of distinction gives them a thrill denied to the rest of us who, when we have no clothes on, have nothing left to take off. More reports, please.

The parallels with today’s monarchy were largely unsought, but they become more obvious as the film proceeds, the final shot of St Paul’s consciously recalling the television coverage of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales. (On the other hand, if one is going to film the entry into St Paul’s, there is only one place from which to do it; television chose it and so did we.)

Still, the conversation as the Royal Family pauses at the top of the steps to acknowledge the crowds has acquired a resonance it did not quite have when the play was written three years ago.

‘We must try to be more of a family,’ says the King. ‘There are model farms now, model villages, even model factories. Well, we must be a model family for the nation to look to.’

‘But, Pa,’ complains the Prince of Wales, ‘I want something to do.’

‘Follow in my footsteps,’ says his unfeeling father. ‘That is what you should do. Smile at the people. Wave to them. Let them see we are happy! That is why we are here.’