WHEN Queen Victoria is rendered in stone she is always severe. Likewise with her portraits where she might be clutching her sceptre or staring sternly into the distance where her empire lies. If a painting dares to show her in a different light it will be to portray her as an ideal of motherhood: she’ll be sitting serenely amidst a froth of frilly Victorian brats where nothing fazes her: she is a perfect mother and a flawless Queen.

Image was everything, even back then. It was an age before the mass media, when a public figure might only get a few chances to make an impression on the population and so it had better be a good one. That statue or oil painting might be the only representation people got to see of you, so it had to sum you up perfectly. You couldn’t take a chance and be jovial and soft. If you only had a few opportunities, you had to play it safe and play it stern. And so Victoria, being queen, empress and a role model for the public, had to cultivate an imposing image, particularly as she was so young when she assumed the throne and, if Victoria (STV, Sunday) is to be believed, surrounded by old, arrogant men who were waiting for this young lady to stumble.

As far as the young queen was concerned, the world was full of these old men and she had to make sure she didn’t put a tiny foot wrong. Hence the sour-faced, grim Queen Victoria we recognise from paintings, stamps and statues. But if you read about her, going behind the image and to see what her biographers had to say, you’ll hear stories of a young woman with a sense of humour and a whopping appetite for sex and love.

You’ll even hear the most famous story of her supposed dourness deconstructed: when she delivered the famous line “We are not amused”, she wasn’t being imperious and using the intimidating “royal we” to put someone in their place.

Rather, they were at table and some buffoon was trying to regale them all with smutty stories and Victoria stepped in to shut him up and save her guests from more tedium, letting him know, quite simply, that they were not amused. Instantly, our opinion of her changes. She goes from a sourpuss to a gutsy hostess trying to shut up a blethering bore.

It was refreshing to see the “Widow of Windsor” in this new light and this series, with Jenna Coleman playing the young queen, was all about such new light. When it opens, we see her acting like a child on Christmas Day.

She’s woken from bed to be told her uncle has snuffed it and she’s now the boss. She runs through the corridors in her nightgown with her long hair flying and her wee spaniel chasing her. And there’s humour here, too.

When she first visits Buckingham Palace she finds the thrones are too high, and that when she sits on one her tiny feet are left dangling above the floor. There’s no trace here of the bereaved and allegedly grim old queen she became and I was glad. Here was a new drama which wasn’t going to trot out old stereotypes or play it safe (even though, yes, we had a series about the young Victoria not so long ago. That’s no crime. TV does endless cop shows so why not two “young Victoria” shows?)

But my gladness was dimmed when the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, appeared, and began strutting around in tight trousers like Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy.

As the handsome PM and the pretty Queen began to flirt and smile, I was annoyed. Having started so promisingly were we just going to slide into standard costume drama lovey-dovey nonsense, then?

I was wrong. There were indeed rumours at the time of a flirtation, perhaps even a forbidden and silenced love, between Melbourne and the young Victoria, so this wasn’t Sunday-night nonsense, but an intriguing sliver of reality.

However, they may have been stretching reality somewhat by making Melbourne such a handsome devil! Portraits show him as dull and unimpressive but, as with Victoria’s portraits, maybe he was also keen to throw out an image of severity as befits the leader of the mighty British Empire.

You can’t lead three-quarters of the globe if you’re cute and have an impressive bulge in the trousers. Most assuredly not, my good sir!

So Victoria is splendid and enjoyable and if it teeters threateningly close to soppy romance or humour, remind yourself that such things were real and permissible even in the stern Victorian era.

Goodnight Sweetheart (BBC1, Friday) returned this week for a one-off revival. I was glad. The BBC has revived a number of old sitcoms recently and they’ve all been horrendous, tiresome duds, serving no purpose other than to remind us that the Beeb seems fresh out of ideas where comedy is concerned. They’ve got fantastic drama – think of Happy Valley and Line of Duty – but so much of their comedy is atrocious. I don’t need to list them: we all know which ones they are.

I assume the culture of political correctness and the absolute terror of causing offence is snuffing out humour. If you’ve ever moaned on Twitter about finding something offensive then you wholly deserve Mrs Brown’s Boys.

But I was looking forward to the revival of Goodnight Sweetheart as it wasn’t going to be a straight copy of the original, unlike the terrible remake of Are You Being Served?

Instead, it was to be a sequel which moved Gary Sparrow forward in time from the Blitz to the 1960s. This threw up some interesting plotlines: how would he have coped with life in the past?

The last time we saw him, the portal had closed and he was trapped in wartime London. Now he’s in the 60s, so can he still claim to have written all those Beatles songs? What of his wife in the present day? How has she accounted for his 20-year absence? And when the portal reopens and he’s suddenly thrown forward in time, how will he react to smartphones, selfie sticks and hipsters?

All these questions were answered, but they were answered without recourse to laughter. This was a pale shadow of the earlier shows. Something had been mercilessly stripped from it, leaving it as plain and pedestrian as every other BBC1 “comedy”.

Maybe it needed to evoke the Blitz spirit to make it work. Maybe it needed smoky boozers, a plinky piano, searchlights in the sky and jokes about the Germans to make it work. Without that vivid wartime atmosphere it was just another sitcom.