To make this idea effective, of course, and to have a young witness at Court as the pace of events quickened and war took hold - for dramatic reasons Poliakoff has heightened the sense of John's isolation from the family and made it begin as early as 1910 - The Lost Prince has to focus on two Princes, 'the little ones, George and Johnny.' While John is at the centre of the opening part of the drama, in the years leading up to the First World War, George's experience gradually takes over, both at the palace and in the Naval College, which he entered during the war and hated intensely. His guide to events in the adult world in the drama is Lord Stamfordham, the King's Private Secretary, and their conversations are an important part of the whole piece. Poliakoff explains that he invented this friendship between the boy and the man, 'to give the audience an insight into the workings of the court and to inform them about the various events in the outside world, without it seeming imposed on the story.'5 In the second part of The Lost Prince the friendship is broken when Young George asks a question about anti-German propaganda stories and realises that Stamfordham is lying to him.

"The youngest, George and Johnny"

The drama also revolves around a very close relationship between the two young Princes, cast into relief by the fact that none of the King's other children has more than a walk-on part. 'As soon as the children start to multiply in number,' Poliakoff writes, 'the story becomes, for me at least, markedly less engaging'; 'there is something about a gaggle of royal children that is profoundly undramatic.'6 The downside of this has proved to be that few of his audience could grasp who 'Young Georgie' was meant to be, most taking him for the future King George VI. But on a positive note, this relationship between the boys is an attractive idea. I'm not sure how much basis it has in fact, though Poliakoff attests to its accuracy. The elder princes certainly had relatively little contact with John - Prince Edward was eleven years older than his youngest brother and his callous comments at the time of John's death have gone on record. On the day of John's funeral he told Freda Dudley Ward, 'of course my little brother's death plunges me into mourning; don't think me very cold-hearted, sweetheart, but I've told you all about that little brother, darling, & how he was an epileptic & might have gone West any day!! He's been practically shut up for the last 2 years anyhow, so no one has ever seen him except the family & then only once or twice a year & his death is the greatest relief imaginable & what we've always silently prayed for; but to be plunged into mourning for this is the limit just as the war is over which cuts parties etc. right out!!'7 His attitude so hurt his mother that he was forced to go to her and apologise, so he was obviously not close to John (though, on the other hand, he did preserve some attractive photographs of his little brother in his private albums and it was the release of these, curiously enough, that fired Poliakoff's imagination). But George?….. It's certainly possible that he was close to John and Poliakoff is accurate on other aspects of his character.

Another central relationship in the drama - and a rather surprising one - is that which existed between the British and Russian royal families. The Russians make an early entrance into the piece, when Poliakoff's Johnnie is entranced by the Tsar's four daughters, gliding along the beach at Osborne and through the garden of Barton Manor in their familiar white dresses and picture hats. Poliakoff has created a tense little scene between the Tsaritsa and the Prince of Wales during this visit, when she refuses to walk across the dry summer grass without overshoes, which have to be found for her. His published screenplay shows that he intended to make even more of Johnnie's fascination with the girls, showing them playing with the little Prince despite his nurse's anxiety, but that was not included in the final version: we did, however, see John remembering them, writing to them, and later fantasising, on being told that their father had abdicated, that they could all come and share his exile at Wood Farm. Again, it's an attractive idea though there is no evidence to show that Prince John ever met his Russian cousins. But the Russian theme is important to The Lost Prince and some of the strongest scenes in the second episode show George V deciding to withdraw his offer of asylum to the family and then recoiling in horror at the news of their murder - which is also shown in sharp and chilling detail.

Apparently The Lost Prince attracted a very large audience - much larger than expected. Certainly in the weeks that have passed since it was shown everyone seems to want to talk about it, and the question most asked, by everyone from RD readers to the district nurse to the lady in the newsagent's, has been 'What did you think of it - was it true?' The answer is not as easy to pin down as you might think. On one level there were certainly factual errors and we could all sharpen the knives and hack away. Poliakoff's Tsaritsa, for example, was a richly comic creation bearing absolutely no resemblance to the woman herself. Events kept happening at the wrong time or in the wrong order. But it seems worth making the point that this was a drama, not a documentary. At a time when every historical documentary has its own 'dramatic reconstructions' this distinction is becoming blurred, but it is a real distinction. A historian is bound by factual evidence. He has to go where the evidence takes him and he can be judged fairly by his faithfulness to that evidence. A dramatist may take real events but he is always using them for a purpose and that purpose is his priority: he will change the ordering of events, create characters and motivations as the drama dictates, to take the audience where he wants them to go. A good performance of Hamlet will tell you a great deal about the human condition and something about the preoccupations and ideas current when it was written: it will tell you very little about early Danish history. Stephen Poliakoff is not Shakespeare, but in The Lost Prince he is working in the same tradition.