LONDON — In the annals of television interviews, a drawing-room chat with a 91-year-old woman, watching home movies and offering occasional droll remarks, would not seem like edgy stuff.
But that all changes when the woman is Queen Elizabeth II.
“The Coronation,” a documentary on the 1953 ceremony to air on the BBC here and on the Smithsonian Channel in the United States on Sunday, marks a thaw for the queen, who has never agreed to an interview on camera. (The exchange, in deference to palace sensitivities, is being described as a “conversation.”)
It represents the culmination of 20 years of petitions to the palace, backdoor lobbying with protective courtiers, leveraging of family relationships dating back centuries and a television culture that has, with the popular cable series “The Crown,” yielded the queen’s inner life to the domain of fiction.
Anthony Geffen, the film’s producer, said in an interview that “The Crown” was a key element of the case he and the commentator Alastair Bruce brought to Buckingham Palace early last year, in the hope of softening the longstanding resistance to the idea.
“I watched the episode of ‘The Crown’ about the coronation and it struck me that this was bizarre: We have Peter Morgan, who is a wonderful writer, but had no access to the queen, writing his version, which people loved,” he said. “Then there is a version from 1953, and the only person who could tell us the truth about this is the queen herself
The argument came at an auspicious time, ahead of the tide of cotton-candy publicity that will accompany Prince Harry’s wedding in May. Advisers were concerned that “coverage of the royals was constantly just going out and opening a supermarket,” Mr. Geffen said, and were looking for ways to focus attention on the more solemn aspects of the monarchy.
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