By Sian Brewis

Mills and Boon, who ought to know about these things, would have been proud of The Queen (C4, Sunday, 9pm). Its retelling of Princess Margaret’s doomed affair with Group Captain Peter Townsend could have come straight from its pages.

Swooning? Check. Longing looks? Check. Soundtrack of classic jazz songs to accompany shots of romantic trysts? Absolutely.

Not for them the purple prose of the romance novel, though.

Instead they got the next best thing: the support of Fleet Street.

“Come on Margaret!!” screamed one headline; others foamed with impatience: “Will she PLEASE make up her mind?”

It was an odd mix of drama and documentary, darting confusingly between the two.

The Queen (Emilia Fox) barely got in a look-in as her glamorous sister took centre stage and she had to be content with looking haughty and aloof.

Back in the real world, Princess Margaret’s friends explained the attraction of the Battle of Britain ace Townsend, a divorcee 16 years her senior.

“Oh, he was very good looking. He was a war hero. We all were rather in love with him.”

Close friend Lady Glenconner thought she was looking for someone to look after her: “Princess Margaret said ‘I have lost my father and I have lost my sister, up to a point’.”

The documentary parts fared far better than the drama.

Although friends admit Margaret was capable of behaving “really badly if she felt like it” the imagined scene in which she and Townsend were groping about in an air raid shelter as the Queen was delivering the Christmas message to the nation upstairs did rather stretch the point.

Real-life footage of crowds whipped to a frenzy of anticipation by the papers, meanwhile, was fascinating – queues of people standing to catch a glimpse of her car as she drove to be reunited with Townsend; the way the romance gripped the nation.

Actress Anna Massey, then a teenager, remembers: “We were all very heartbroken at her having to forfeit her love.”

You did feel sorry for her: sent on tour to the other side of the world with her mum to avoid scandal; read the riot act by Buckingham Palace and her lover sent to Siberia. Well, Brussels.

For once, this was an understanding TV portrait of the Princess, who normally is pictured as some sex-mad chain-smoking alkie.

Your sympathies were won by Kate McGrath, who played Margaret as more little girl lost then Lolita.

The ending, as Margaret stands alone outside Buckingham Palace having given up the man she loved for duty, was desperately sad.

If it had been Mills & Boon, at least there would have been a happier ending.