Years ago, I remember my friend Tim being incensed by an episode of Downton Abbey that featured the Earl of Grantham’s dog on a lead. Of course, the hound of a great man on a great estate would not need to be tethered, but it didn’t seem like the most significant of details, and I was amused by Tim’s strong feelings on the subject. He is a particular stickler, but people do tend to get quite het up about inaccuracies and anachronisms in TV dramas, as if they’re personal affronts.

Certainly, one might be jolly well naffed orf at the ‘It’s not easy being a princess’ cushion shown in Margaret’s apartment in The Crown. Terribly droll it might have been as a visual gag, but it’s actually our dear monarch who has one that reads ‘It’s good to be Queen’, so this was a heinous example of Peter Morgan playing fast and loose with soft-furnishing facts. Margaret didn’t have a cushion, Lady Di didn’t meet Charles dressed as a mad tree, the Queen Mum may never have said ‘Tippity-toppity, down with the Nazis’ as a toast. But in The Crown, it’s all about personal sacrifice for the sake of the institution. So I am willing to swallow these galling details in pursuit of the bigger picture, which is that I’ve been looking forward to this series all year and no one is going to ruin it for me by pointing out that the Queen didn’t really attend The Royal Variety Performance in 1984.

The dialogue is sometimes clunky and expository, it’s pretty heavy-handed on metaphor – various royals decimating different types of wildlife as the IRA picks off Dickie Mountbatten, Di cutting a swathe through the palace on rollerskates, etc – but I love it all the same. The glorious gossipiness, resplendent costumes, exquisite backdrops, whether a Scottish loch or sumptuous state dinner, and the feeling – just a feeling, not a fact – that you’re getting the inside track not just on matters of state, but tawdry royal shenanigans - the intimate minutiae of daily Windsor doings. Watching them all milling round the boot room at Balmoral is like Hello! magazine brought to life. I don’t care if it’s true or not – it feels true, and that’s all that matters to me.

I have no idea why some are applying the rigorous journalistic standards of Panorama to a soapy period drama that shows the royals playing a raucous drinking game of Ibble Dibble with Margaret Thatcher. I was more worried that the scene made me sympathise with the Iron Lady than whether it really happened or not. When I say I’ve been looking forward to the series all year, principally what I’ve been looking forward to is seeing Gillian Anderson play Maggie; something I could never have imagined when, as a teenager, I shivered with lust as she and Mulder hunted down aliens. But now the moment is here, and I finally get to see Mags and Lilibet face-off in their weekly catch-up, I can’t quite decide how I feel about it. In many ways, it’s a mannered performance, but I guess Thatcher was mannered, and would have talked like that even when she was doing the ironing. It’s just that you can catch a glimpse of the gorgeous Gillian under that twisted grimace, and it’s disconcerting, fancying the Milk Snatcher.

Anyway, you barely need to get through the first episode to see that it’s Lady Di who’s going to be the star of the show this season. Emma Corrin is sensational, inhabiting the part fully without ever becoming a caricature. The head tilt, crooked smile, doe-side-eye, faint air of dimness – she nails it, but manages to make Diana wryly fun, too. The Prince and Princess of Wales may have made a disastrous marriage, but Josh O’Connor and Emma Corrin are the perfect match of talents, and distract you from worrying about whether Olivia Colman is right in her role. Just to indulge that concern for a second, there was that hilarious garbage Telegraph article that described her as having ‘a distinctly left-wing face’. I always interpreted that as her having a nice face, open and endearing – whereas when the Queen isn’t smiling at one of her horses, her face is distinctly, erm… right-wing. Just as it’s hard for Gillian Anderson to be anything but ridiculously sexy, it’s hard for Olivia Colman to be anything but ridiculously nice, and really, I don’t want to shatter any illusions here, but I’m not sure the Queen falls into that category.

It’s interesting how badly The Firm is coming across in this series – a snobbish, cold, unenlightened, self-satisfied bunch of slaughterers who make no effort to widen their circle to include the future King’s future wife. When the Queen has a heart to heart with her son on the eve of his wedding night, ignoring the tears trickling down his cheeks as he contemplates wedlock with a woman he barely knows, her best offer is to tell him a story about Queen Mary marrying her dead fiancé’s younger brother out of duty. Thanks, Ma – or rather, Ma’am. Elizabeth is monarch first and mummy second – as her real-life cushion tells you – and in fact, any maternal instincts seem pretty much buried beneath her cheerful urge to go out and finish orf a fatally-injured deer.

Before I get thrown in the Tower, I just want to finish by recalling my favourite Crown moment, one that encapsulates its artistic creativity. In the first season, there’s a miraculous scene between Churchill and Graham Sutherland, the artist painting his 80th birthday portrait. It concerns the Chartwell pond the prime minister himself paints, and their conversation strays into dark waters, revealing the death of Churchill’s daughter Marigold. It’s a scene of extraordinary power, one that delves beneath the surface to bring up terrible grief and loss. Winston’s dawning realisation as Sutherland gently points out to him why he returns to the pond is breath-catchingly poignant and revelatory - TV drama perfection.

The conversation probably never happened, and if they’d stuck with pure facts then we would never have had the privilege of watching this beautifully tender, delicately underplayed and entirely made-up scene. Drama is just that - show, spectacle, fiction, fairy-tale. While it may be based on real-life events, tightly or loosely, the act of recreation implies a gap between what actually happened, and what we’re shown. Its truth is an elusive and multi-layered one, open to interpretation and, of course, criticism. We flavour it with whatever portion of salt makes it palatable.

So, in conclusion, let us raise a glass to The Crown and its wonderfully inventive, revealing inaccuracy: TIPPITY TOPPITY, DOWN WITH THE NAZIS.

• The Crown, Series 4 – Netflix, 10 episodes