The Force-free grimness of Andor is the Star Wars story I’ve been looking for

Picture: Disney Plus

Screen 1, the Granada Kingston, Christmas 1977. The ten-year-old me is taken to see a film known simply as Star Wars. A bombastic John Williams fanfare gets things underway, followed by the now-familiar ‘opening crawl’ revealing the film’s context: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” civil war is being waged by an alliance of rebels challenging the “tyranny and oppression of the awesome Galactic Empire”, which is in the process of constructing “a sinister new battle station”, powerful enough to destroy an entire planet, noting that its completion “spells certain doom for the champions of freedom”. The scene set, the camera pans across space to a small craft being pursued by an enormous Imperial destroyer firing on it, before it is captured. We are then introduced to a princess and a masked, dark-suited baddie. A 45-year legacy is commenced.

Despite the obvious sci-fi setting, that first Star Wars film was, essentially, an amalgam of children’s fairy tale, Flash Gordon, The Virginian and The Dambusters. Little did anyone expect that within six years there would be two sequels and the establishment of a canon that would extend both further forward and further back in the so-called ‘Skywalker Saga’. But it will also broaden out beyond that core, expanding into a complex universe with Biblical degrees of history.

Today, Star Wars is a “franchise”, owned by the Disney corporation, and merchandised through a plethora of films, TV series, novels, comic books, video games, Lego sets (and, indeed, Lego films), clothing, theme park rides and just about anything you can sell with a character embossed on it. It’s easy to be cynical about the commercial monster that George Lucas’s original story has become, especially as some of the original filmed sequels and spinoffs have been patchy. Heartfelt and earnest, but sometimes lacking. Fan lore dictates that of the nine-film Skywalker story, the prequel and sequel trilogies weren’t a patch on that first film (subsequently renamed “Episode IV: A New Hope”) and its follow-ups, The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi (or Episodes V and VI if you’re keeping up). But that’s fans for you, and they’re very, very finicky about this whole enterprise.

I’m less critical: remove some of the obvious canonical duplication of the sequels and the awful dialogue of the prequels and there’s actually a story of political intrigue and profound moral choices running through it all. Core to this is the character of Sheev Palpatine, who starts out as a charismatic but ambitious and, eventually, manipulative politician, with a dark secret - he is a member of the shadowy, resurgent Sith, an ancient cult that leverages the Dark Side of The Force for its own supremacy. Over time, he engineers a civil war and all but wipes out the Jedi, another quasi-religious order, representing the ‘Light Side’ of The Force, before eventually becoming the supreme leader of the Galactic Empire, transforming the once liberal republic of planets into a malignant, all-powerful jurisdiction with quite overtly fascist tendencies. 

In 1977, the Empire was easily comparable with Nazi Germany of three decades before. In that first film British actors hammed it up as obedient generals working for Emperor Palpatine to subjugate myriad planets and species throughout the galaxy, who enforced that subjugation with legions of white body armour-clad Stormtroopers, another nod to mid-20th Century history. Over time, the Empire has become comparable with dictatorships at large. It is also strongly believed that Lucas was also making a statement about America’s overwhelming use of force against the Viet Cong. In 2022, however, parallels are even more uncomfortably drawn with modern Russia, not the very least, the ascension of a former KGB agent to become the unopposed supreme leader of a pariah state, now seeking the ideological erasure of an entire nation in order to connect with a shared cultural past.

This brings me to Andor, the latest entry in the Star Wars universe. Set in the timeline five years before the period depicted in A New Hope, Andor is more spy thriller than space fantasy. No surprise, given that the show has been created by Tony Gilroy, who wrote the screenplays for the first three Matt Damon-starring Jason Bourne films. It centres on Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), a petty thief who becomes integral to the burgeoning rebellion. Fans will have seen him in the prequel film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which reveals how the rebels acquire the Death Star schematics immediately before the 1977 story (enabling the space station to be - spoiler alert - blown up by Luke Skywalker at the end). Andor establishes how the rebellion builds momentum, both through the actions of its titular hero, but also politicians like Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), who would remain a key figure in the alliance all the way to Return Of The Jedi. 

The Disney+ show, which reached the end of its first season yesterday, has been notable for its lack of Star Wars set pieces. There are no light sabre duels, no dogfights between X-Wings and TIE fighters, and no mention at all of The Force or its Dark Side, or Jedi Knights and the metaphysical mysticism of it all. Unusually, too, for Disney’s other Star Wars television entries, Andor has been remarkably good. Gilroy set the standard with Rogue One which, despite teeing up the Skywalker storyline and its inherent swashbuckling, was nothing like it.

Picture: Disney Plus

Indeed, Andor bears more stylistic DNA with Gilroy’s work on the Bourne films. While it doesn’t depart completely from the fantasy, it portrays deeper layers to the rebellion’s origins. It employs a bleaker palette, with cold, wet and windswept Cumbrian landscapes and a disused Buckinghamshire quarry used for locations instead of the more exotic CGI backgrounds familiar to the film series. Like much else in the Star Wars canon, the UK plays a significant part in production, with Pinewood Studios remaining - as it has since that first film - the primary centre of operations, but with that comes a further array of British thespians populating the snarling ranks of Imperial officers. 

Sci-fi shows aren’t meant to do well critically, and the disquiet over Star Wars spinoffs like The Book Of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi and even The Mandalorian, put hardcore fans on a footing before Andor made its debut. But at the end of the first 12-episode run, any misgivings have been well and truly forgotten. Critics have bracketed the show amongst the best of streaming TV, alongside recent high watermarks like Better Call Saul. Most have branded Andor the outstanding best Star Wars TV spinoff to date. Viewing figures, however, have not been so ebullient.

Critics have all highlighted Andor’s intentional greyness and its depiction of a rebellion built by ordinary citizens, with heroism and sacrifice on a broad, unrecognised scale inherent to the cause. Some of it resembles very real opposition to despotic regimes, more than anything else in the entire canon, but with neat touches that allude to the core Star Wars story. 

While the Skywalker films concentrated on those at the apex of the conflict - Luke, Leia, Darth Vader, Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and the demonic Palpatine - Andor focuses on its middle-management. In the timeline the series is set in, Luke is still a Tatooine farmboy, unaware of both his real father and the existence of a twin sister, while Leia herself is the adopted daughter of an Alderaan nobleman. Below their dynastic psychodramas, however, a whole stata of society - like Cassian Andor - are putting their lives on the line to challenge the ruling order, raiding Imperial bank vaults and staging town square riots armed only with the space equivalent of pitch forks.

Midway through Series 1, Andor is imprisoned in a harsh Imperial penal colony, forced into manufacturing industrial components under brutal conditions (with Andy Serkis putting in a brilliant shift as shop steward). Eventually, the prisoners riot (in scenes not dissimilar to those coming out of Apple’s iPhone factory in China…). In a coda after the closing titles of the Series 1 finale, we see Imperial droids piecing together the components Andor and his fellow inmates have helped construct, with the camera panning out to reveal them to be part of the Death Star that, ultimately, he will die for in getting the station’s blueprints to the rebels at the end of Rogue One.

Picture: Disney Plus

Disney+ has promised that Andor will be limited to just the two seasons, with the second - currently in production - taking the story up to the events of Rogue One. Series 2 is expected to concentrate further on the zeal with which Imperial Security Bureau officer Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) - a cypher for Gestapo levels of menace - pursues Andor in the belief that he is part of the glue holding together the rebel alliance throughout the galaxy. And there is more to come from Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), the scholarly agent provocateur masquerading as a respectable antiques dealer who provides a link between Andor’s field endeavours and Mothma’s efforts to fund the rebellion in the background.

Criticism of other entries in the Disney-era Star Wars canon has aimed its fire on the writing, rather than than the lavish production values. It’s the niggle that continually impacts regard for the prequel film trilogy, too, which had George Lucas’s personal involvement. With Andor, Gilroy and his fellow writers have made the science fiction of Star Wars only a minor part, and the show has been more rewarding as a result. All sci-fi is requires suspension of disbelief, and the idea of Star Wars being set in a distant galaxy where humanity has flourished and jazz bands play in cantinas patronised by a multitude of sentient species, has invariably required the audience to blithely accept that life as we know it here has propagated on the other side of the cosmos in parallel. But stripped back to its basic premise, the universe Lucas created drives, in all its chapters, the duality of good-v-evil. 

It was never meant to be thought provoking, which is why it appealed to the ten-year-old me as much as the 55-year-old version now. The difference with Andor is that it appeals more to the adult than the child. And like an excitable child, I can’t wait for the concluding 12 episodes, even knowing what lies at their very end.

I can’t be arsed and I don’t think the pundits are either

Has there ever been a World Cup - or, indeed, any international sporting event - to generate so little excitement than the tournament now underway in Qatar? You’d have to go back to the tit-for-tat Cold War-proxy boycotts of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and it’s equally mardy sequel in Los Angeles four years later to see the sort of apathy coming across from the Gulf.

Even in the opening match of the FIFA World Cup 2022, between the hosts and Equador, half the locals buggered off at half time, leaving vast swathes of empty seating in the Al Bayt Stadium. But if they were disinterested, what about the BBC’s presenting panel of Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer, Alex Scott and Ashley Williams? Let’s just say the energy in the room, as they introduced the fixture, was weird. As, by now, you’ll have read on Twitter or in the Daily Mail, it was the oddest opening to a football tournament ever. None of the eye-twinkling cornyness of the Des Lynam era, or slightly dodgy cultural cliches about the host nation. No. Not even a two-hour buildup and the promise of a “footballing fiesta”. Just a dead-eyed Lineker piece-to-camera, a canvass of pundits for opinions on the controversies-numerous of Qatar hosting the event, a forensic analysis of the issues from Ros Atkins, the presenter of the BBC’s Outside Source (does he ever wear anything other than that blue shirt underneath a blue blazer?) and for some ‘balance’ an interview with the BBC’s esteemed International Editor, Jeremy Bowen, on the tiny kingdom on the Arabian Peninsular. And then, more or less, straight into the opening game.

Controversially, perhaps, there was no mention or inclusion of the tournament’s opening ceremony on BBC1 (it was shown on the online iPlayer), all adding to the sense that the BBC was making the point that everyone else has been making about this World Cup being staged in a country with an atrocious record of human rights, and in which hundreds of migrant workers are alleged to have died building the tournament’s stadia in appalling conditions. 

The day before Lineker had promised a “mini Panorama”, and in that respect, the dour introduction to what should be the quad-annual highlight of the footballing calendar was a spectacularly joyless affair. “Woke virtue signalling”, came the inevitable online reaction, with the usual effluence of right-wing bile attacking Lineker - as per - and, equally, predictably, Scott (whose status as a female, black and - recently revealed - gay presenter didn’t need emphasising to wind up those with, clearly, an agenda). And, of course, the fact that it was on the BBC was enough to send keyboard warriors of a particular political persuasion fuming into orbit.

I’ve blogged before about Scott’s treatment from people who seem to have a problem with her being female, or speaking with an accent or, more likely, being a woman of colour. Credit, then to football writer Oliver Holt who - in none other than the Daily Mail - called out the “scorn” and “cynicism” her presence on the BBC in Qatar has met. “Some people want to silence voices like hers, voices which make inconvenient observations about FIFA and its decision to hold the World Cup in a country that treats women as second-class citizens and gay women as criminals,” he wrote. “She deserves our admiration for having the courage to travel to Qatar to work for the BBC and continue doing a job she loves, and which she has earned on merit. At this men’s World Cup, in particular, it is more vital than it has ever been before that there are top-class female broadcasters reporting on the sport and reporting on the issues.”

It could easily be argued that everyone should just focus on the football, and embrace the hippy ideals of nations coming together in the name of sport. The music journalist Lesley Ann Jones made the point today in a blog post that there wasn’t such indignation over the Romans executing Christians in the Colosseum, or Egyptian slaves dying in the construction of the Pyramids. But while all of that is true, the Romans and the Ancient Egyptians didn’t exist in the modern age of enlightenment. Plus, you’d have hoped that in the millennia since, migrant labourers shouldn’t be forced to work in inhumane conditions on extremely low pay, or under extremely restricted terms of employment.

I get it, that Qatar’s religious laws and culture - as anywhere else, for that matter - should be respected but why, then, award the staging of a competition to a country where being gay can result in execution, when the institution awarding those rights wants everyone to know how diverse and inclusive it is? Of course, we now know why those rights were awarded. And how. And while I will watch the World Cup this year, I will do so uneasily at best, and queasily at worst.

Once upon a time you’d await a World Cup with giddy excitement. While I’ve never been one to prepare for an international tournament by pinning a fixtures calendar to the fridge and compulsively filling up a sticker album with every competing squad member, I have enjoyed the traditions. Chief of these has been the fact that World Cups are staged in the northern hemisphere summer, with most of the contributing domestic leagues done for another year, and the players able to focus on their countries long enough before heading off to the beach for a few weeks until the new season gets going again. But clearly not this year. No barbecues before games, not even the draping of national flags outside houses and flying from car aerials. This World Cup has come around to flat relative indifference. 

In time, the actual football might change that, but I’m not holding my breath. I might eat my words if England progress, and I won’t pretend that I won’t be watching. But the controversy surrounding the tournament will not abate. And for that, anger must be awarded equally to both Qatar and FIFA. 

Saturday’s ridiculous rant by FIFA president Gianni Infantino (“Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker.”) in which he effectively equated being bullied for having red hair as a child to the treatment Qatar is receiving from Western sensibilities, wasn’t just a surreal moment, but underlined the preposterousness of the competition coming to the country in the first place. “You are not gay,” Alex Scott scolded him in the BBC’s opening segment. “You will not understand travelling to a country where you are fearing for your life about your preference of who you choose to love.” Bravo, Alex. In a sport where the bland go to extraordinary lengths to avoid having opinions (even Shearer, sitting to Scott’s right, took the beige route in his own comments on the controversy), it was refreshing to hear it called out.

Not enough, though, have called out the decision to award Qatar the event in the first place. Not enough have stood up to FIFA, despite the overwhelming evidence of its snout being buried deep in the trough. In April 2020 it was reported that, following years of investigation, the United States Department of Justice said that representatives working for Russia and Qatar had bribed FIFA officials to secure hosting rights for the World Cups in both countries. In 2015 FIFA president Sepp Blatter resigned amid investigations by both Swiss police and the FBI, while several FIFA administrators have been convicted of corruption. Even the slippery Blatter admitted recently that the decision to award the World Cup to Qatar had been a “poor choice”, not that his comments will have exonerated himself from culpability in the appalling decision.

Picture: Twitter/England

The event is here now. I suppose we have to get on with it. The controversy of how it got here will not go away and, inevitably, as the tournament proceeds, fans will get caught up in all the usual arguments over penalties that weren’t, offsides that should have been given, VAR making a mockery of everyone else’s 20-20 vision, and all the pantomime villain-booing that comes with watching other countries play football (or, in other words, players from certain Latin nations diving like they’ve been shot).

England are up and running, with a comfortable win over the equally controversial Iran under their belts. England captain Harry Kane dodged an immediate yellow card before even kicking a ball by not wearing a ‘One Love’ rainbow armband (though Alex Scott did it for him). England avoided a fine from FIFA for the intended gesture. “England bottled it”, came the reaction on Twitter. “They’re just bowing to the oppression of the Qatari government.” one fan told the Press Association. “Let the players focus on the football,” came another viewpoint. They both have valid arguments. 

Nor will this undercurrent of disquiet go away as the next few weeks continue. The tournament might be progressing, but it’s a coin toss as to whether football is.

Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark

Picture: Francois Duhamel/Danjaq, LLC, United Artists, Columbia Pictures, all rights reserved

If there had been any any doubt before, the opening of the envelope first thing on the morning of my birthday this year proved how well my wife knows me. Inside were tickets to a screening of Skyfall at the Royal Albert Hall, accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performing Thomas Newman’s score in sync with the film. One of my favourite Bond films, with live music, in the majestic setting of one of the world’s greatest performance venues. I couldn’t have asked for a better present.

Shown as part of a series of such screenings celebrating the 60th anniversary of the 007 franchise, the evening was introduced by Sir Sam Mendes, Skyfall’s director, who elaborated on how a director, highly regarded beforehand for his theatre work, came to helm cinema’s longest-running action franchise. Evidently, running into Daniel Craig at a party in New York, the actor suggested that Mendes should direct his third outing as Bond. Mendes agreed, although he later realised it wasn’t in Craig’s gift to offer the job. The next day, sober, Mendes contacted executive producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson to see if they’d be interested. Wisely, they said yes, and one of the best films in the-then 50-year history of the series was set in train.

Every Bond fan will have their own favourites, and every Bond fan will have their reasons. Every film will have its memorable moments, every film its great lines, every film its naff bits. It’s why we love Bond, let’s face it. Rugged action with the occasional Carry On element thrown in for larks. Under Mendes, Skyfall added another dimension, developing out some of the darkness in Bond’s backstory (namely how he became an orphan), but played out through a cinemascope the series had rarely delivered with its lively cartoonism of characters, stunts, gadgets and glamour. 

Bond films have always reconfigured Ian Fleming’s original ideas with a more contemporary twist (though the rush to make Moonraker a Bond for the Star Wars era was patently flawed), but with Skyfall, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan’s story addressed spycraft’s very real transition from Cold War adversariality to cyber threats (“I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pyjamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field,” Ben Whishaw’s newly-appointed Q informs Bond on their first encounter, to which the agent retorts: “So why do you need me?”. “Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled,” comes the reply).

Few at the time would have realised that Skyfall was the apex of an arc that would conclude with No Time To Die, but there was an enrichingly downbeat nature to the film, built around Javier Bardem’s delightfully camp villain Silva seeking revenge on M (Dame Judi Dench) by attacking MI6 itself. Yes, it didn’t veer too far from the established mad superbaddie formula, but - and here’s where the difference was made for me - there was a noticeably different cinematic quality about Skyfall. 

Picture: Francois Duhamel/Danjaq, LLC, United Artists, Columbia Pictures, all rights reserved

Part of that is indebted to Mendes’s use of Sir Roger Deakins as cinematographer. The scenes in Shanghai, especially the tower block fight between Bond and assassin Rapice - are some of the most stunningly-photographed moments I’ve seen this side of a Michael Mann production, capturing the Chinese city’s LED sophistication and BladeRunner-esque futurism. But, equally, are the scenes shot in Scotland, as Bond and M attempt to get ahead of Silva by driving the famous Aston Martin DB5 up to the titular Skyfall ancestral home, amid breathtaking - and cold - moorland scenery.

Growing up watching Bond films on television as Christmas and Easter holiday treats, I absorbed their escapism. Never did I process the body count, or the many moral ambiguities the films presented, not least of which the inherent sexism. To me, Bond was glamour: dressing up in one of my dad’s suit jackets made me Bond, purely for the myopic belief that it looked more like a tuxedo than a school blazer. Skyfall, for me, reset the franchise as a storytelling venture, albeit one with elements of Bond tradition and familiarity. And knowingly so: back to that first encounter between Bond and Q, in which the quartermaster hands over a ticket to Shanghai, a Walther PPK (with a palm-print encoder in the grip) and a tiny little radio device. “A gun and a radio. It’s not exactly Christmas, is it?“, the somewhat entitled secret agent remarks icily. “What, were you expecting an exploding pen?” says Q. “We don't really go in for that anymore.”

While Mendes would next helm the somewhat flawed Spectre, the fourth Daniel Craig outing before his finale in No Time To Die, the knight-director can take pride in making a Bond film that will forever be a high benchmark in the 25-film canon to date. Naturally, a few weren’t too fond of Skyfall, because it was too wrought, or because it suggested an ageing Bond, though this last gripe completely ignores the preposterous sight of Roger Moore at 58 in A View To A Kill (though having read that, having just turned 55, I’m increasingly sympathetic…). 

In Skyfall, Bond bleeds, he gets shot - twice (including once by Miss Moneypenny) - he drinks to excess, fails his physical and psychological tests, and ultimately loses the maternal figure that Dench’s M is portrayed as. For once, or at least the first time since George Lazenby shed a tear at the death of his new bride in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond is made vulnerable amid the existential threat Silva poses to MI6. While he ultimately comes through, as has always been the outcome, Skyfall’s emotional heft - brought to bear by Mendes - combined with its stunning visual complexion. Last night it was a joy to see it again on a big screen.

© Simon Poulter 2022

I shouldn’t ignore, either, the experience of watching it with a live orchestra. Such are the perfect acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall that if there hadn’t been almost a hundred musicians and conductor Anthony Gabriele waving his baton at them below us, you would have thought you were listening to the original recorded score. 

Deservedly, though, the ensemble generated impromptu applause after playing the film’s title song, Adele’s vocal presumably isolated for playback over the live orchestra. But the greatest ripple was reserved for The James Bond Theme, Monty Norman’s twanging guitar riff, which lasered through the 5,000-odd seated punters as a reminder of the most iconic piece of theme music in film history. We weren’t introduced to any of the individual performers, but whoever the job fell to play that riff should know that the reverence in the audience was akin to that reserved for David Gilmour performing the Comfortably Numb solo, or Jimmy Page wigging out on Stairway To Heaven. Hard to remember this was a film we were still watching. But what an experience. 

Crown heights, lows and affairs

Picture: Netflix

The sight of Prince Charles, as was, wielding a pair of secateurs recently in an episode of The Repair Shop was a somewhat caramelised moment of royal PR. But given the near-constant political psychodrama of the last 12 months, the Royal Family has provided a welcome distraction.

In June we celebrated the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee with street parties that had barely been cleared away when the monarch popped her clogs in September. Before that event there was a brief cameo from someone called Liz Truss, who was, apparently, Her Majesty’s Prime Minister for all but two days. Less than two months later, Truss was handing the keys to 10 Downing Street to His Majesty King Charles to pass on to Rishi Sunak, like the landlord of a high-turnover bedsit.

Westminster’s turmoil, coalescing around the craven behaviour of a tribe of professional politicians, successfully pushed into the background the occasional soap opera that is the House of Windsor. But tomorrow we’ll get a reminder of just how bad it can get when The Crown returns for its fifth, and arguably, most controversial series to date. More on that in a moment.

The Queen’s death in September brought about a genuine appreciation of the late monarch and her 70 years of service. Her son and heir has also enjoyed newfound national respect. But it hasn’t always been so, as The Crown will highlight. The four series so far have charted the Queen’s unexpected accession in 1952, through the changing topography of Britain’s reputation on the world stage, and that of its political domestic landscape, arriving at the apparent fairytale of Charles and his shy, aristocratic nursery school teacher bride. ‘Dianamania’ featured heavily in The Crown’s fourth series, but also the first signs of tensions in the royal marriage. That storyline will be turbocharged in Series 5, which has already been generating salivating ink, and not all of it good. 

Criticism of the show’s depiction of such relatively recent events has come from a variety of directions - people like Dame Judi Dench and two of the key political figures of the era, John Major and Tony Blair, all echoing calls that emerged during the last series that Netflix should run health warnings advising viewers that they’re watching a piece of fiction, not a documentary. But, to be blunt, you’d have to be particularly stupid to think that you were.

On one level The Crown is pure trash TV - the airport novel you leave behind in your hotel. And being something of a culture snob, too, I shouldn’t like it at all. I do quite like the Royal Family: not, you understand, in the manner of those dotty types with shelves of commemorative mugs who drape red, white and blue bunting outside their houses when one of the Buckingham Palace corgis has a birthday. But I do admire many of the things ‘The Firm’ does and stands for. I also accept, too, than in the aftermath of Diana’s death in 1997, the family - led by the Queen - went to some lengths to rehabilitate and modernise its reputation (although it would appear that Prince Andrew didn’t get that memo). None of this, however, will prevent the inevitable judgement that The Crown’s latest season will generate and is already. 

Picture: Netflix

It opens in 1991 with Prince and Princess of Wales on their so-called “second honeymoon” in the Mediterranean. The marriage was already in unhappy territory, as The Crown alluded to in the last series, but by 1991 it was rumoured to be in genuine trouble. The following year we learned by how much. 

1992 will forever be known as the Queen’s “annus horribilis” (mine wasn’t great, either - I was made redundant a month before Christmas. Yeah, thanks Sky TV...). She had a point, though: Charles and Diana formally separated, as did Prince Andrew from from Fergie (the duchess, not the football manager), the Princess Anne divorced Captain Mark Phillips, and a devastating fire broke out at Windsor Castle. The tabloids then had a field day over revelations that Fergie (the duchess, etc) had had an affair with a Texan millionaire, before being photographed sunbathing topless with another man who was not Prince Andrew. To cap it all, Andrew Morton’s tell-all book, Diana: Her True Story came out, revealing just how the marriage collapsed (with three people in it…) along with the princess’s own struggles with bulimia and suicidal thoughts. 1992, now I read all of this back to myself, is reminiscent of the opening titles voiceover of the sitcom Soap, which after an explanation of the Tate and Campbell families, and their latest complications, would intone: “Confused? You will be.” 

Picture: Netflix

There’s no doubt that the new series of The Crown will make for uncomfortable viewing in the royal household, in the unlikely event that any of them - even the renegade Prince Harry - decide to tune in. Not to add to hyperbolic tabloid examination at the time, the period it will cover was one of the most existential eras of royal history since the abdication of Edward VIII. Some might consider the period to be even more damaging than that.

The collapse of, and fallout from, Charles and Diana’s marriage will dominate the fifth season’s storyline, but there will be plenty of other elements to bait critics, including suggestions about Prince Philip’s fidelity, and that the Queen herself asked questions of her own about the relevance of a monarchy in contemporary times. Here’s where the backlash is both understandable, but also open to criticism: a somewhat salty drama about Henry VIII, Elizabeth I or even Edward and Wallace Simpson is historic fact; scarcely raising an eyebrow. But depict anything from more living memory is to commit an act of heresy. There in lies The Crown’s challenge: chronologically it has now reached the stage where its plot lines are interwoven into our modern, all-consuming media awareness. 

Last month Dame Judi Dench wrote a strongly-worded letter to The Times in which she said: “The closer [The Crown] comes to our present times, the more freely it seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism.” The tabloid and even the broadsheet media were nothing but crude sensationalism at the peak of Dianamania. On the morning she died in Paris in August 1997, I vividly remember the Sunday Times featuring something about Diana, Charles and even the young princes William and Harry in almost every section. The simple fact is that she sold newspapers like no other member of the Royal Family had before or, frankly, since.

In the new series it is suggested that Charles (played this time by Dominic West) was manoeuvring to get his-then 65-year-old mother to abdicate. He is also portrayed as believing the Queen (Imelda Staunton in this run) was neglectful towards him. In her missive, Dench wrote: “This is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent. No one is a greater believer in artistic freedom than I, but this cannot go unchallenged.” She called on Netflix to reconsider a decision not to carry a disclaimer at the start of each episode pointing out that it is a work of fiction. Others have piled in, including broadcaster and royal biographer Jonathan Dimbleby who floridly branded The Crown “nonsense on stilts”, a sentiment shared with Sir John Major, who is depicted in the series (by Johnny Lee Miller) as the recipient of Charles’ suggestion that his mother should step down. The former prime minister has denied that any such event happened and branded the show “damaging and malicious fiction”.

Picture: Netflix

Sir Jonathan Pryce, who plays Prince Philip in the new series, has some sympathy for Major’s view insofar as he gets the sensitivity. But Pryce also pointed out that, after four series, the audience knows what it is watching. Netflix itself has also defended its show, saying: “it is a fictional dramatisation, imagining what could have happened behind closed doors during a significant decade for the royal family - one that has been scrutinised and well-documented by journalists, biographers and historians. It’s a fair point. And, of course, no one’s forcing anyone to watch it. The timing, though, of the new series - scheduled a long time ago - is unfortunate, coming so soon after the extended period of mourning for the Queen. Plus, there is more revelatory strife to come if and when Prince Harry’s tell-all memoir comes out next year.

This year’s jubilee and then the Queen’s death compressed into a matter of weeks a sense of national unity about monarchy. It even appeared, briefly, to unite the Royal Family itself (Prince Andrew’s ostracising not withstanding). Whether it wants it or not, the global fascination with this venerable institution will continue, so it’s no surprise that a Californian-based streaming service is carrying on regardless. From their point of view, the royals are box office. 25 years after Diana’s passing, the media’s obsession that ultimately contributed to her death hasn’t abated, either. Readers of the Daily Mail and Daily Express are still fed a daily diet of inconsequential bilge about the Royal Family, peddled in the belief that they are satisfying a national fixation. 

Now, the preoccupation that plagued Diana has been conferred onto her youngest son, admittedly the result of his own actions, but with a tone decidedly more sinister than any of the reporting about his mother. Worst of all is the Mail’s obsession with Harry and Meghan. Relentlessly, every single day there is something new about one or both of them, usually in the form of viperously speculative ‘news’ or gobshite commentary from psychopathically possessed writers like Dan Wootton. It’s notable that Harry’s brother William gets none of this. By contrast, the new Prince and Princess of Wales appear to live a model royal life. Tell me there isn’t an agenda going on there.

Which, I’ll admit, makes my acceptance of The Crown as entertainment somewhat contradictory. It’s clearly not a documentary, but nor is it a fabrication, either. Somewhere in between. Executive producer Peter Morgan knows that, but he is probably more aware than most that his sixth and final season will walk a tightrope in bringing the story up to, it is believed, Diana’s death which, contrary to some reports, hasn’t been recreated. The show is not expected to continue any further beyond that time. 

Inadvertently, the princess’s death - still believed to be caused by moped-borne paparazzo chasing her Mercedes through the Pont de l’Alma tunnel - set in train the much needed modernisation of the Royal Family. But also highlighted how detached the monarchy had become. It’s a theme The Crown develops from the outset in Series 5, which opens with the Queen contemplating the dilapidated state of her beloved Royal Yacht Britannia, a metaphor for the institution itself. But at a later point in the series, Diana’s own plight, and increased displacement in the family, is brought to the fore, with the princess bearing her soul to the now-disgraced Martin Bashir in that controversial Panorama interview. The Crown adds a theatrical menace to the encounter, with Bashir telling Diana to “Trust no-one” (an unintended nod, I’m sure, to The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson who hammed it up as Margaret Thatcher in Series Four). 

32-year-old Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki has the incredible weight on her shoulders of playing Diana, perhaps more so than any other ‘character’ in the series. Recreating the most photographed woman in the world in the 80s and 90s, and not just a visual impersonation with the right wig and the doe-eyes is, though only a small part of being Diana. Debicki has to expose, fully, Diana’s numerous vulnerabilities. Of the criticism of The Crown’s quasi-fictional depiction of royal life, the actress recently told The Guardian: “I understand what the show is and what it’s trying to do. I also understand the reaction to it. I think this is a period of time that’s been told many times over and will continue to be told.” She maintains that the show’s producers have applied care and respect to tell the story, but emphasises the point that “it is, clearly, fictional.” 

Well, yes, but only up to a point.