ITV will show Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, taking the Prince of Wales to bed and promising him the “fun” that he says is lacking in his life, in a film called Whatever Love Means.

Channel 4 will offer an “arresting and challenging” life of Princess Margaret, which shows the Queen’s late sister in graphic sex scenes and taking drugs.

BBC One has signed Anne-Marie Duff, who played Fiona in Shameless, to star in The Virgin Queen, which is being touted as the highlight of its autumn season. The four-part epic follows Elizabeth I through her love affair with Robert Dudley, her triumph over the Armada and her relationship with the young Earl of Essex.

Channel 4 will be showing its own Elizabeth I biopic with Dame Helen Mirren in the lead role. This version will expose the “grimy, lustful truth behind the opulence of the English court”. There is one scene that details the humiliating gynaecological examination to which Elizabeth was subjected when contemplating marriage to a French prince.

Jeremy Irons plays the Earl of Leicester and Ian McDiarmid will be Lord Burghley. It will be screened as a sober counterpart to the Margaret romp, The Queen’s Sister.

ITV1 will pair its Charles and Camilla film with a dramatisation of Edward VIII’s love affair with Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée.

Francis Hopkinson, who is Channel 4’s senior commissioning editor for drama, said that the Princess Margaret biopic, which includes a lesbian kiss, was based on interviews as well as existing sources.

“It’s quite affectionate,” he said. “She is our heroine and it wasn’t intended as an exposé. It shows the excesses of hedonism and goes some way to explain the mental breakdown that led to her disappearance from public life.”

Kevin Lygo, Channel 4’s director of television, said: “It’s factually accurate and it’s a racy romp.”

He said the drama captures Margaret “in the late Fifties and early Sixties when she was absolutely the most glamorous public female figure in a Diana-like way . . . and then it all went a bit wrong”.

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