Ongoing creative discussions about The Great revolved around tone and point of view. “The tone of a show is something you hope to achieve while writing and filming but may never really find until it gets to the edit,” Boys says. “Tone is something you need to keep in the back of your mind at all times. You need to gain the audience’s trust by showing them the universe of the show and keeping within its rules. Go too far in one direction and you run the risk of losing the audience. Get the balance right and it allows you to play around with jokes in the show and make some lines funnier.”

As an example, Boys describes approaching a scene involving the Emperor, Peter III (Nicholas Hoult), and General Velementov, head of the armies (Douglas Hodge). “In a scene where the Emperor is criticizing the General, if we were to show it from Peter’s POV it would show him being in control and frustrated that things weren’t going the right way. If we present it from the General’s POV and the audience knowsthat Peter is wrong but the General can’t tell him that because of the subservient relationship between them, it allows you to play off reaction shots. The scene is funnier because we’re looking to see what the General’s reaction is.”

This cuts to the heart of Boys’ approach to editing the show. “There’s a mismatch between behavior in public and what people actually think in private. The Great depicts a world with a lot of secrets and where a lot goes unsaid. Using reaction shots is an effective way to show what people are thinking.” Conventional wisdom has it that comedy works best when presented in a two-shot but Boys felt that wouldn’t work on a show whose characters hide their true feelings. “There are a lot of funny reactions to be had in single.

Separating a character from the characters around them tells the audience that this is a glimpse into what they are really thinking.” The character of Catherine (Elle Fanning) is introduced as “a wonderful, naive optimist” but by the end of the second episode she realizes the world is not as rosy as she hoped. “We worry for her but there’s something rather lovely and heartwarming about her character. Where one person might see all the problems and obstacles in their path, she is intent on fixing it and making it better.”

The Emperor, on the other hand, is simply “inevitable,” describes Boys. “If you take someone who is spoilt rotten, surrounded by yes men and who has complete power then he is what you end up with. There are definitely parallels to be drawn between Peter’s court and current events as well as previous royal and political leaders but I think Tony was more interested in talking about feminism than current politics.”

The Great is inspired by true events rather than pretending to be a historic document but the kernel of the story is faithful to Catherine’s achievements not least being a strong woman in a foreign country at a time of extreme misogyny.

Autumn and Winter of 2019 with editorial in a room adjacent to the set. This made it handy for the editors to catch up with McNamara while maintaining their own space to work.  “I’ve known Billy for 15 years,” Boys says. “We have this shorthand where we invite each other to look at something and without communicating we’ll just watch the material and provide our feedback. It’s a good way of getting an honest response. We play poker together so I know when he’s lying to me! “I’d not met Edel before but she was just as willing to share scenes and exchange opinions on work we’d cut.

Because the show is very dense with characters and plot you do have to have a very clear through line for each character so you know who everyone is, what they are doing and why. We’d have long chats about what we’d left in and which pieces were cut and the impact of those decisions on characters in earlier or later scenes.”

The Great depicts a court of opulent depravity with copious amounts of profanity, drunkenness, public sex and wanton cruelty. McNamara ensured that scenes were filmed with maximum gratuity and gave the editors responsibility to judge where to draw the line. “When you have torture, sex and violence along with comedy you have to be very careful about how you balance it,” Boys says. “Show the audience too much blood and it can turn their stomach or make them flinch too much and you break their trust. “It comes back to tone. We had many discussions about what was gratuitous or vile and to what extent we wanted to pull it back in the edit.”

In episode 2, titled “The Beard,” there is a dinner to celebrate the Emperor’s victory over the Swedish army and some severed heads of soldiers are brought in and placed in front of the courtiers while they eat. “Then something extremely graphic is done with the heads. It’s very gratuitous and we spent a lot of time deliberating whether it had overstepped the mark. We got it to a point where myself and [Executive Producer] Marian Macgowan enjoyed it but Tony felt it had gone a bit too far.

We invited Billy, Edele and [assembly editors] Chris Hunter and Andrew Walton for their opinion to gauge where the balance of the scene should be. The fix can be as subtle as taking out six frames from one shot or adding six frames to another. In this case we brought it back a touch more towards Tony’s point of view. He’s always right!”

The main challenge, though, was finding the right pace for a comedy which unusually is an hour per episode spanning 10 episodes. “Most comedies are half hours and when you’ve worked in them you get used to the rhythm. You know instinctively after a few episodes that if Act 1 feels a bit wonky then if you take a minute out of the first 11 minutes you can perfect the rhythm. In an hour you can’t rely on the same formula. You can’t simply double the duration of ‘acts’ from 10 to 20 minutes. It doesn’t work that way.” Boys sought clues watching stand-up comedy shows and noticed that the audience tends to flag with an hour of non-stop gags. “I noticed that at about the 40-45 minutes mark a good comedian will go into a longer anecdote which is maybe not as laugh-out-loud funny but it gives the audience a breather before coming back with a barrage of jokes in the last 10 minutes.

I’d look for a point in the show where it felt natural to relax like that. In episode 9 ‘Love Hurts,’ for example, there’s a very violent scene that leads into a perfect moment of introspection played through Catherine’s point of view which gives the audience a chance to absorb the horror before the comedy starts again.”

The final 10 minutes of the season finale demanded particular attention and the best part of two weeks to solve. With the audience anticipating a spectacular climax, the story has Catherine needing to pause and make an almost impossible decision. “This isn’t what you’d usually want to happen at this point in a series,” Boys says. “You’d want to increase the pace to build toward a climax but, in this case, she is faced with a decision that stops her in her tracks. Because the show lives so deeply in point of view, I spent a long time making sure the audience felt Catherine’s POV – her frustration, her indecision and her heartbreak, really pushing those feelings as much as I could so that the ending is as satisfying a treat as the audience has every right to expect.”