Penny is everything that the Queen is not, according to this show: beautiful, bright, intellectual. The Queen only gets excited when playing with her corgis, like an overgrown toddler playing with toys. When Philip tells her that he is providing a DNA sample, he is exasperated that she doesn’t ask about the science behind it: “Aren’t you curious? Not even a little bit?” Morgan paints her as being pretty thick. Penny, by contrast, waxes lyrical about DNA being our essence, a glorious language, and other things I stopped listening to because I was distracted – like Philip – by her lustrous looks.

Everyone involved with the series has insisted that the inclusion of Penny among the characters is not meant to signify anything untoward. Oh, come off it. True, there is no sign that they were having a sexual affair, but in this series they are certainly having an emotional affair.

It all comes to a head when Philip tells the Queen that they have nothing in common, and he has been forced to “seek companionship elsewhere”. In conversations clearly plucked from Morgan’s imagination, the Queen shoots back: “She’s half your age. Couldn’t it just be a secretary? A nice girl from the typing pool with a short skirt and adoring eyes?”

Eventually, the two women have a showdown of sorts. Penny posits her theory that Queen Mary refused to grant refuge to the Romanovs because the women were rivals, and Mary was jealous of the Tsarina for being prettier. Do you get the hidden message here, folks? There may as well be a neon arrow pointing to Penny’s head. The Crown has never been subtle, but here we’re being bludgeoned.