What's sexy is what leads up to the sex,” she says. The Affair was a great series, but after a while you just think ‘not again’. It's the chemistry, not the amount of flesh. We had to fast-forward the sex scenes because they were so embarrassing. For me, Game of Thrones, which I watched with my daughter, was just ridiculous. I was determined to unpack all of that,” she explains.īut this wasn’t an excuse to put sex front and centre in a prime-time drama, and Goodwin, whose biggest influence is Jane Austen, says that she wasn’t at all pressured into suffusing the show with corset-busting rompery along the lines of The Tudors and Versailles, although a raunchy scene involving Lord Palmerston on a beach later in the series looks set to be talked about. For most of her life she was not the picture that everyone recognises her for. They're very perceptive and sparkly, but her image got fixed.

Her TV series challenges the general image of the dour, frumpish Queen towards the end of her reign.

She has spent 30 years studying Queen Victoria, first reading her diaries at university and later writing a historical novel about her. Goodwin won’t divulge the identity of the royal stickler, but it's a valid point. “Isn't that extraordinary? But actually, I feel I know her better than he does!” “I was told off recently by a member of the Royal family for referring to her as Victoria and not “Queen” Victoria,” says Goodwin. Coleman is acting out a scene from episode four, in which she takes tea with Dr John Snow to hear about his theory for the cholera outbreak in late 19th-century London. We’re on set in Yorkshire for filming of the third series of Victoria, Goodwin’s retelling of the early reign of the century-defining monarch, which returns to ITV for an eight-part run this weekend.

Daisy Goodwin is crouched down in a corner of Buckingham Palace watching a little Westie dog being coaxed into obedience by Jenna Coleman and a tube of Primula cheese.

Daisy goodwin victoria returns