ITV boss hints at Victoria series 3 UK timing

ITV director of programmes Kevin Lygo assured RadioTimes.com that the new run would air “in the spring or summer” following an unforeseen delay which has meant that the last we saw of the drama was the 2017 Christmas Special.

• Victoria series 3 will explore tensions in the Royal marriage says Daisy Goodwin
• Meet Lord Palmerston the colourful Foreign Secretary who clashed with Queen Victoria
• Meet the cast of Victoria

Lygo said that a combination of factors explained the hiatus but that he wanted the right scheduling to maximise the audience: “We have to get it right and put it up against the right things on the BBC and elsewhere,” he said.

The decision could mean that Victoria will once again play against BBC1 drama Poldark which is expected to air in the summer. Both dramas are made by the same production company, Mammoth Screen.

The third series follows the Queen and her husband Prince Albert (Tom Hughes) in 1848, a turbulent year as revolutions spread across Europe.

It will see Victoria under pressure from the government to leave London for her own safety, amid fears of revolution and unrest in the capital. But the Queen is also facing pressure within the royal marriage.

When she was writing the series in 2017, scriptwriter Daisy Goodwin told RadioTimes.com that she is planning to dramatise suggestions that the Queen may have withheld sex from her spouse in order to avoid constantly finding herself pregnant.

“She has six children in eight years – which is a lot – and there are some gaps, so I wonder whether there may have been some withholding [of sex] on both sides,” Goodwin said.

Series three will also recreate the spectacular Great Exhibition of 1851 when a huge glass building was erected in London’s Hyde Park and showcased the glories of Britain and Victoria’s Empire.

New cast members include Tony and Olivier Award nominated actress Kate Fleetwood. She will play the Queen’s “mysterious sister” Feodora, who makes an “unexpected return” into Victoria’s life.

Lewis star Laurence Fox is joining the show as the “charismatic and wayward” Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, the controversial exponent of so-called “gunboat diplomacy” in the era when he sent the Royal Navy to blockade the Greek port of Piraeus in retaliation for the harming of a British subject.

Victoria series three is currently airing on PBS Masterpiece in the US.

This article was originally published on 6 February 2019