Victoria queen of the screen P
resenting a new face of Queen Victoria to an audience who feel they already know everything there is to know about her, was the considerable challenge facing Daisy Goodwin (left), writer and creator of ITV’s Victoria. Her starting point, Daisy says, was the young queen’s journal. ‘I read history at university and read her diaries, a treasure trove for anyone’s who’s interested in the real smell of the past, as opposed to how it was interpreted later.’ ‘I was 19 and reading a diary entry the young queen wrote when she was 19 or 20. She’d just got engaged to Albert and she wrote about how handsome he looked in his cloak and white cashmere breeches with nothing under them, and I thought - whoa, this is not what you expect!’ That’s because, explains Daisy, when we think of Victoria, we think of late Victoria, the photographs of the grieving widow in black. ‘But actually Victoria as a young woman liked pleasure, dancing and fun, especially when she became queen, because she’d had this very restricted upbringing and she really wanted to go for it.’ The diary entries gave Daisy a whole vision of who Victoria could be. Partly to redress the balance of our tired old view of her, but also as she explains, ‘All the iterations of Victoria have been written by men and I come to it from a different point of view. A lot of the assumptions we make about Victoria, we make because she’s a woman. For example, think about her relationship with John Brown after Albert dies. If she were a man, you’d think it was perfectly reasonable for them to have a relationship with someone else, after all she was only 42. But because it’s a queen, not a king, everyone’s scandalised. You have to look at things differently.’ Once the cast were on board, they too added their own different perspectives on the characters. ‘They’re amazing. It’s the greatest thrill on earth to see this incredible cast turn this idea into something, giving it shape and form,’ says Daisy. ‘I’ve been so lucky to have actors of that calibre and I think the way it has been realised on screen is incredible.’ Jenna Coleman in the title role, like the real queen, is tiny in stature. ‘The fact that she’s
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smaller than the rest of the cast is part of it,’ says Daisy. ‘You get a sense of the fact that Victoria had to project so much to be the dominant figure, so at the beginning I had the vision of this very small woman surrounded by this forest of white haired old men. Plus, Jenna brings this innate dignity, it’s difficult to write, but you know it’s there. And that sense of always being watched – those are things she’s very good at conveying. ‘Tom Hughes is Prince Albert,’ she adds, ‘I can’t even separate them. When he’s on set he is always Albert, and it’s quite a transformation. He’s totally method acting. ‘In series three you’ll notice he puts on a bit of weight because that’s what Albert did. You really get the sense of this man inhabiting the character completely. And it’s brilliant because he really gives flesh to the most under-recognised royal we’ve ever had. His accomplishments were extraordinary and weirdly it’s the woman who gets all the credit, not the man, but Albert deserves a lot of attention.’ In the storylines for the latest series, we see Albert’s reforms of the university curriculum, starting at Cambridge, to get people studying sciences and botany instead of just Latin, Greek and theology. We also see how he was the driving force behind the Great Exhibition. ‘He was part of the new and looked towards the future. He decided that it should be an international exhibition, a bold thing to do at the time; he felt that Britain should be part of Europe, not separate.’ There are plenty of details that Period Living readers will particularly enjoy in the new series, promises Daisy. In the Great Exhibition scenes, look out for the stuffed frogs playing violins, which, along with a weasel wedding, were Victoria’s favourite exhibits. ‘Victorian taxidermy was the thing,’ says Daisy. ‘I put the stuffed frogs in the script, and low and behold they made it in!’ It’s not just about accuracy in the small props, as Daisy explains, ‘The depth of detail in the set design is extraordinary. If you go back over the three series, you can see how fashions are changing. At the start Buckingham Palace is quite austere. It’s still basically a Georgian house. Then as the series
Feature Karen Darlow Photographs © ITV/Mammoth Screen; Daisy Goodwin portrait © Getty Images
As smash-hit historical drama Victoria returns to our Sunday evenings for its third series, creator Daisy Goodwin talks about her inspiration, the stars of the show, strong women, and those all-important period details