By Olivia Colman's Best Actress Oscar win for her role as Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite is the first bit of completely unironically, heart-swelling good news we've had since that fortnight last summer when it looked like Harry Maguire's forehead could probably have won a snap election if you'd stuck a rosette on it.
The wave of goodwill has been pretty overwhelming. If you're reading this from overseas, let us fill you in: there've been street parties, everyone's had the last two days off, and the Red Arrows have been doing celebratory flypasts every 20 minutes. The lads are shattered, but they recognise that living through this wave of Colmania is a truly special thing.
If The Favourite and the very well-deserved Oscar nod is your first introduction to Olivia Colman though, now's the time to get acquainted with our nation's newest national treasure's greatest hits. Consider this a visual Now! That's What I Call Olivia Colman.
Peep Show (2003-2015)
Obviously. The stages of Sophie's disintegration - from Mark's performatively breezy but unattainable love object, to steady if slightly distant girlfriend, to extremely distant and disillusioned sort-of-wife, to hard-drinking party animal and general liability - could have felt cartoonish. Colman, though, invested Sophie with so much inner unhappiness (even before she bursts into tears at her wedding with Mark) that it made all the characters around her richer and more interesting for the fact that they didn't realise it. Seasons four and five are peak Sophie, for our money.
Tyrannosaur (2011)
Paddy Considine's debut as a writer-director was an extremely bleak kitchen sink drama about a widower whose uncontrollable rage forces everyone away from him, until Colman's Hannah reaches out to him while he hides behind a clothes rail in her charity shop. They become friends, and she tries to leave her own abusive marriage. It had a pretty low-key release, but Tyrannosaur has grown in stature since partly thanks to Colman's extraordinary performance: you get her bravery, her warmth and her faith in people, but it's all shot through with fragility and lingering self-doubt.
Broadchurch (2013)
So much more than your average whodunnit police procedural, Chris Chibnall's drama explored how the death of an 11-year-old boy and the rampant suspicion, media interest and mutual grief tears apart a seaside town. David Tennant's DI Alex Hardy and Colman's DS Ellie Miller are a great double-act - him dour and cynical, her warm, bloody-minded and generally up for an ice cream - and Colman's Miller holds the thread of the first series' revelation through to the bitter conclusion, gradually hardening against an increasingly dark world.
Fleabag (2016)
Fleabag's faux-bohemian godmother is very clearly horrible (in fact, the character sprung from Colman's request to play "a real bitch" after becoming mates with Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the set of The Iron Lady), but Colman plays her with such an underhand slyness you completely buy how she can navigate the world getting exactly what she wants without anyone noticing quite how nasty and vindictive she is. Colman relishes the chance to work against her general air of sunny trustworthiness, and makes the most of Waller-Bridge's juicy script.
The Office (2001)
A tiny cameo, but a very important one. Colman plays a reporter from Inside Paper who's profiling David Brent, and while Brent has all the best lines in some of Ricky Gervais' best work in The Office, it wouldn't work as well without Colman's subtle shading. Her rapidly dwindling patience is laced with with some well disguised but obvious (to the viewer) confusion and bemusement that makes the whole scene work. So many things flash across her face at the line: "Put... David Brent is refreshingly laidback for a man with such responsibility." It's genuinely masterful.
The Night Manager (2016)
Even among a cast which ended up filling the 2017 awards nominations, Colman shone in this John Le Carré adaptation. Colman got the part of intelligence officer Angela Burr when she'd just become pregnant, and channelled the just-get-on-with-it spirit of Frances McDormand in Fargo - when it's suggested it might be best for her to slow down a bit, what with being pregnant and everything, she snaps: "Bugger off". Steely and relentless, Burr is on the trail of Hugh Laurie's shady arms dealer (there aren't many other kinds of arms dealer, really) and enlists an ex-soldier-turned-hotel-manager (Tom Hiddleston) to crack him. A deserved Golden Globes gong for Best Supporting Actress followed.
The Lobster (2015)
She's a quietly spoken but very forbidding hotel manager in the first of her Yorgos Lanthimos collaborations, set in a dystopia in which singletons have to find a partner within 45 days or be turned into an animal. Outling the rules of attraction to Colin Farrell's singleton in an unsettlingly matter-of-fact way, she says: "A wolf and a penguin could never live together, nor could a camel and a hippopotamus. That would be absurd. Think about it." It's a left-field premise, but her presence anchors the whole thing with a very real dread.
Flowers (2016)
There are comedies which toy with dark themes and ideas, and there are truly dark comedies that examine the truths behind taboos. Slightly underrated comedy Flowers is the latter. Colman is music teacher Deborah Flowers, whose husband Maurice (Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh), a children's author, is deeply depressed. Deborah's trying to hold the fort with the couple's 25-year-old twins still hanging around, and is fraying at the seams with the effort. See her desperate panic-glug of sangria at hearing her daughter's new girlfriend is a recovering heroin addict for a flavour, though she's got an arsenal of snide quips to hand too.
