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.

A front row to history

Picture: Twitter/British Army

The flags have returned to full mast. Television presenters are wearing colour again. Politicians are back on our airwaves spinning their way through the cost of living crisis. Life after 12 extraordinary days is back to normal. 

“Don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to something else,” crowed the predictable tweets from the more reactionary quarters of social media last night as the Queen’s funeral, and a week and a half of blanket coverage of what has been, without wishing to sound hyperbolic, a properly historic event, came to an end.

On a superficial level, the days since news broke on 8 September of the Queen’s death have shown British pomp and circumstance at its most baffling. Anyone of a republican point of view, or simply indifferent to the role of monarchy in a modern democratic society will have found the enforced lockdown of anything extravagant in the wake of a frail 96-year-old’s death absurd: the abandoning of broadcast schedules, on-air presenters dressed uniformly in black, filling hours of rescheduled rolling programming with nothing but conjecture and babble.

Picture: The Royal Family

But to many, many more, the passing of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession of King Charles has been nothing short of history unfolding before us. From the moment daytime TV was interrupted by grave-looking newsreaders dressed in black, standing in front of Buckingham Palace, the auspicious moments kept coming. They were captured on live television in a manner no monarchic transition in Britain’s long regal history has ever previously witnessed: we were there at Balmoral when The Firm’s senior team arrived in united grief; there when the Queen’s body was transported to Edinburgh and there when it landed at RAF Northolt, emerging from the loading ramp of a giant, slate-grey Globemaster transport aircraft. We were there as it was driven slowly through rain-soaked west London streets to Westminster. There when more than a quarter of a million people queued for hours on end to see the late monarch lying in state, itself a demonstration of endurance, unquestioning loyalty and quirky fanaticism. We were there when the new King signed registers, met the newly-installed prime minister, and shook countless strangers’ hands in the devolved provinces. There as two estranged brothers and their wives went walkabout in Windsor. And there, finally, as members of an estimated five billion-strong worldwide audience tuned in for a six-hour funeral.

An opinion poll published shortly before the Queen’s death suggested that more than 60% of the UK was broadly in favour of the monarchy. In the days since, that manifested itself at the expense of anything else getting a look-in on the news agenda. Liz Truss, in post for just two days before HMTQ popped her clogs, had barely got going with her new agenda before she was reduced, temporarily, to a bit part role in the nation’s fabric. If nothing else, the mourning period gave us respite from the relentless churn of politics that have consumed our media for…well, forever.

The billions watching around the world, not to mention the tens of thousands who lined the funeral cortege route from Westminster to Windsor, on top of the thousands who assembled before giant screens in municipal parks, gave credence to the belief that the Queen’s death meant a lot to many, even those in places where she’d only ever been heard of. 

She was “the world’s Queen”, a remarkable comment, given both the political systems in place int the free and not so free world, but also our own post-imperial, ‘Little Britain’ inferiority complex. Somehow she even transcended her own status - an unelected head of state in several nations, featuring on at least 30 currencies, and with one of the wealthiest portfolios of any individuals on the planet. And, yet, when she said “We will meet again” in that resonant address during the pandemic, she touched further and deeper than any politician did during the crisis. There was a reason why, over these days, we’ve seen and heard endless vox pops conducted in high streets and market squares saying more or less the same thing - that they’d miss - in no particular order - her smile, her duty, her constancy.

If that hadn’t affected you, then the lump-inducing notes from the lone piper in Windsor’s St. George’s Chapel yesterday as they faded away provided the eeriest of musical beds for the lowering of the Queen’s coffin into the chapel’s vault. Anyone who has ever attended the funeral of a loved one will know that awful, irreversible moment of goodbye. It was etched on the face of King Charles as the camera framed him. I challenge anyone not to have been moved by it, or anyone not to have empathy for his family.  

Wherever you stand on monarchy, there’s no escaping the fact that we’ve emerged from an incredible period of our nation’s history. The “ending of the second Elizabethan Era” has a grandeur to it, but it would be fascinating to know how historians will regard it decades or centuries from now. Television has amplified it: when the Queen ascended the throne in 1952, and was crowned in June 1953, hardly anyone had TV sets. At the end of her life, we’ve got them all in our pockets. Yesterday I spent the better part of ten hours in front of our TV, from the build-up to the funeral to its conclusion. Believe me, I’m no rampant monarchist, but I know a once-in-a-lifetime event when I see one. On various levels it was fascinating - the application of long planned-for protocols, arcane traditions, the single greatest collection of world leaders ever assembled, the mass of people turning out for one person. And this on top of moments such as Charles and his siblings resembling human waxworks for their 15-minute vigil at Westminster Hall, as members of the general public filed past, some in disbelief as to who they were seeing before them.

It was all part of a celebration of a life as much as commemoration of a long life lost. The hats, the outfits, the smiles, the corgis, the appearances with James Bond and Paddington Bear, the waving - there is a lot we’ll miss.

Picture: Twitter/The Royal Family

Fathoming out the royal psychodrama

Picture: Apple TV/The Me You Can't See

What a mess. What an absolute mess. Forget the recriminations over Martin Bashir’s now-rogue Panorama interview with Princess Diana, with the BBC lurching into an existential crisis of its own doing. It’s the royal family I worry about.

Perhaps the mainstream media doesn’t, in its capricious relationship with the monarchy - a press owned by republican barons who feed off the royals’ misfortunes while fuelling them at the same time. With the Bashir scandal, a number of them have found themselves observers of a perfect storm, the opportunity to whip up right-wing frenzy over the BBC itself (the same old tropes about political bias and the licence fee), while more gorging at the never-ending feast that is the psychodrama within the House of Windsor. That began, arguably, when a young Diana Spencer met Prince Charles at a polo match in the summer of 1980. That set in train a sequence of events that, to take a gloomy view, would end with her death at the age of 36 in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris, and continue further as her sons grew up and, in the case of the youngest, became a target himself for media anger, rather than a recipient of sympathy.

The contrast in reporting has become polarised: Prince William and “Kate Middleton” (never the Duchess of Cambridge) are the wholesome, perma-smiling poster children of the monarchy’s future, with three delightful children and the right balance of working life and family life. Prince Harry and “Meghan Markle” (never the Duchess of Sussex) are spoiled and entitled, who’ve escaped royal duty and decamped to California where they carp and moan about how pitiful life in the Royal Family is, and how they’ve had to escape institutional dysfunction and racism to make the life they desire. That, I think, sums up the narrative.

The latest spin in the Sussex vortex is Harry’s revelations about his mental health to Oprah Winfrey, in essence, a continuation of the interview he and Meghan gave in March, but this time going into far more detail. So much more detail that Piers Morgan has compounded his apparent ongoing feud with the couple (which may or may not be rooted in Meghan allegedly spurning his invite for a drink some time back) which led to him calling Harry a “whiny little brat”. You don’t dare look at the comments beneath Morgan’s diatribes in the Mail Online, which amount to a national pile-on against Harry and his wife. There is no compelling evidence that the ire Meghan draws is racial in motivation, but you can’t help have your suspicions. Either way, she is seen as some poisonous gold digger, who stole a hitherto popular prince away from us. And how dare Harry cause so much pain to his grandmother and father, and indeed break up the once solid sibling duo with William? All of a sudden, Harry - who fought for his country and has admitted that he was probably at his happiest in the army - is being demonised…for what?

In the new interviews with Winfrey, Harry - speaking eloquently and without any of the histrionics he’s been painted as applying - opens up about the depths both he and his wife have been through, accusing the royal family of treating Meghan with “total neglect” when she was suicidal, and he has used drink and drugs to mask the pain of his mother’s tragic death. What is clear, and what those who criticise Harry seem to refuse to acknowledge, is just how deep the effect of Diana’s death, when he was just 11, has had on him. Which begs the question - who has the right to question that? Even his revelation that Meghan didn’t go through with suicide while pregnant with Archie was because she thought it unfair on him “after everything that had happened to my mum and to now be put in a position of losing another woman in my life, with a baby inside of her — our baby.” He added that Meghan persuaded him to go into therapy to address his demons - again, further fuel to the anti-Meghan brigade - as he says that he found life a nightmare, especially living in London, before he met his wife, because of the painful memories of his mother at every turn.

You can see his point or, at least, should. And you can see why Morgan, once a tabloid newspaper editor (let’s gloss over the Mirror front page scandal that he was ultimately responsible for...) is going to go for the attention Harry finds so traumatic, recalling how, as a young boy, sat in the back of his mother’s car, he saw how she was in tears while being pursued by press photographers, a darkly prescient event in itself: “The clicking of cameras and the flash of cameras makes my blood boil,” he tells Winfrey. “It makes me angry. It takes me back to what happened to my mum, what I experienced as a kid.”

Harry also reveals that Prince Charles’ own treatment of him hasn’t helped. “My father used to say to me [and William] when I was younger, ‘Well it was like that for me so it’s going to be like that for you’.” Charles, as The Crown appears to depict, was a somewhat morose child as he tried to figure out his place in the world as future king, in a family with cold emotion running through it, and a household of courtiers adding to the atmosphere with their institutional stuffiness. Harry’s revelations about his own father come at little surprise, but at least he’s being honest in talking about them, even if it risks the rift with his brother, who dutifully doesn’t speak about family strife, being prolonged.

I only lost my father, at the age of 90, to Alzheimer’s a couple of years ago, so I couldn’t begin to empathise with how an 11-year-old Harry must have confronted the death of Diana, at the same age he is now. More so, how he would have confronted it within the refined world of the royal family. “I wish she could have met Meghan,” he reflects to Winfrey, “I wish she was around for Archie.” You’d have to have a heart of stone to not find that statement sad. But, I think, you’d also have to have a heart of stone for not having sympathy for where Harry has ended up, and why - to his own admission - he made the decision to leave royal life and chart his own course in California. And, again, here he presents another stick for critics to beat him with. ‘It’s all very well Harry wanting out,’ runs the line, ‘but he’s still trading on his title’. Well, yes, true. But can you really blame him?

The arguments over Harry’s royal status could go on all day, but I keep coming back to the central premise of his appearance in Winfrey’s new series, The Me You Can’t See, which he also co-produced, for Apple+: at its core seems to be the continued inability for people to accept mental health issues to begin with, and secondly, that someone born into privilege, who has benefitted supremely from that privilege, has any right to struggle. “Poor, poor, pitiful me,” to reference the Warren Zevon song. “Whiny little brat” indeed. We stray, here, into the British predilection for indulging the politics of envy. Harry wants his cake and eat it, but does he not - as any bereaved son should - deserve some slack? Or is he just supposed to ‘man up’, the stock response to any weakness?

If, though, we are to take mental health more seriously, as we should, the criticism Harry has faced for opening up has been astonishing. As psychologist Wendy Bristow points out in The Times today, he’s faced accusations of whingeing, even from mental health professionals. And yet, she argues, despite greater public awareness of mental health problems, especially amongst men, Harry’s state is dismissed as weakness or, with another angle on his public image, wokery. I’m squarely with Bristow in her advocacy of therapy, which Harry tells Winfrey has been an essential part of coping. I went through it myself, a few years ago when dealing with combination of challenges. In the way I usually equate things with pop culture, I felt that if Tony Soprano could get therapy, then so could I. How much it materially helped, I couldn’t say, but it was certainly good to talk. 

Unfortunately, Harry is clearly not being given the respite his confessional to Winfrey might seek to achieve. A look at the Mail’s landing page sees him plastered across it. Countless stories, countless angles, and all the usual bovver boys steaming in with their why-oh-why think pieces. Helicopter up, and we see Harry featuring in a timeline of royal schism that shows no end. I do sympathise with the Queen at having to deal with all this, especially having only buried her husband a month ago. To some extent, I sympathise with Charles, too, though, as the rogue Bashir interview with Diana revealed, he doesn’t come out of things with much dignity. But I do respect Harry for wanting to do something about the “cycle of pain” of his own upbringing with his own children. “I don't think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody,” he told podcaster Dax Shepard recently, “but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I've experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I'm going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don't pass it on, basically.” In the interview he lucidly talked through where he was coming from: “It's a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on,” adding that he’d started to piece it all together from his father’s schooldays (miserably captured in The Crown), to the chain of events that occurred when his parents met, and he came into the world. 

I’m no flag-waving, bunting-stringing, street party-attending royalist, but I do like the royal institution. I think that it has a place in British society that is positive, for the most part, makes people smile. That Prince Harry’s commentary about himself and his family may be undermining the institution is open to debate, but perhaps it’s the revolution the royal family finally needed. In the grand scheme of regal schisms, dating back centuries, this is - to some extent - just a rift. Those who passionately take the red-white-and-blue bunting view of it all will still enjoy seeing the Queen on Zoom calls with Scout troops, Charles making his impassioned comments about the environment, and even William doing his earnest work with “Kate”, presenting a softer, more modern, chino-wearing profile for ‘The Firm’. But maybe, just maybe, we should cut Harry some slack. Because, hasn’t he been through enough?

Games of thrones: The Crown and other guilty pleasures

Picture: Netflix

So, it’s happened. I’m embracing pop culture in a manner I hadn’t previously thought I would. Full disclosure - I recently bought Kylie Minogue’s new album, DISCO, on the strength of reviews, and absolutely love it. Likewise, I ordered Paloma Faith’s new release Infinite Things purely because of her performing the corking breakout single Gold on The Jonathan Ross Show. Both purchases were made ‘on behalf’ of my girlfriend as gifts to her, but I've cast a sneaky ear to both quite shamelessly. More than once. Similarly, Steps were on BBC Breakfast yesterday morning doing their new single, and I actually quite liked it. Yes. Steps. WTAF? 

The trouble is that recent months have levelled many things up. We’ve craved comfort. My television consumption has changed out of all recognition, though this is partly to do with moving in with a partner and her teenage daughters back in February, shortly before The Plague descended. In stark comparison to my single life, watching repeats of ancient Mock The Week episodes and Cop Car Workshop marathons on Dave, I have now been introduced to Bakeoff, Masterchef, Gogglebox and something quite queasy called Naked Attraction. It’s not that I have an aversion to reality, it’s just that I’ve always preferred escape. Living on my own, and assuming Dave wasn’t showing an evening of old Would I Lie To You? episodes, I’d dip into the Bond movie collection, or something of that ilk. Now, amid my new family life, we’ve blown through Selling Sunset and The Tiger King, shows I wouldn’t have hitherto watched in a thousand years based on synopsis alone. Similarly, BBC1’s engrossing Ambulance fly-on-the-wall series about London's emergency responders would have been too much reality. But watched it we did. Every single episode. And it was good.

As the pandemic dragged through the months, and a warm spring begat a hot summer before sinking into a wet autumn, with lockdown coming, going, and returning once more, we have, as a nation, sought comfort in our tellyboxes. We have consumed things not out of intellectual fulfilment, but not out of mindless amusement either. Well, not all the time. I have, though, surprised myself with what I’ve actually been happy to indulge. Case in point: The Crown. I normally find biopics about people with whom I’m familiar uncomfortable, largely because I’m somewhat retentive and pick holes in any attempt to appropriate real individuals I somewhat know about. Thus, I struggled with Bohemian Rhapsody because I knew most of the stories already and didn’t see the need for actors - as good as Rami Malek was as Freddie Mercury - retelling them. And from the same director (Dexter Fletcher), Eddie The Eagle gave a mildly amusing account of Edwards’ story, although Rocketman at least sought to get under Elton John’s skin. But I still can’t help sitting there going “That wouldn’t have been like that!” or “He wouldn’t have said that!”, and similar such pedantry. Actually, all of this applies to just about every and any rock biopic you care to mention (and the less said about the Bowie effort, Stardust, the better...).

The Crown, on the other hand, has presented a very different dilemma. The British royal family are, arguably, one of the world’s most written about, scrutinised and gossiped over institutions. Even if you’re not particularly interested in royalty, you will have found it hard to avoid them. If you’re British, Her Maj the Q is on the front of every stamp and the back of every coin. And at age 94 not-out, Elizabeth II has transcended generations since she became sovereign at the age of 25. Her extended family, for good or for bad, remains the most photographed on the planet. There’s little we don’t know about the royals, and what we don’t gets confected by the press and so-called royal watchers as supposed fact. 

So, quite what Peter Morgan’s dramatisation of the Queen’s reign opens up is subject to question. High question. And yet the sumptuous Netflix series has been the ultimate lockdown comfort food. You know Princess Anne would never call her elder brother “Eeyore” out of mockery in real life, as she does in one episode, but it's a delicious thought (actually, the princess recently admitted in a TV interview for her 70th birthday that she had watched early episodes of The Crown and found them "quite interesting", though had not seen any more recent. That notwithstanding, she's the only royal known to have seen any of the series, a reminder that Anne has probably been the coolest of the Queen's offspring, though the competitive field for that title is not too broad...).

I have been in Prince Charles’ company on two occasions: in the first - for a speech he gave at Clarence House on climate change - he was exactly as you’ve seen him on television, sharing his thoughts on one of his genuine passions. The humour was light and somewhat contrived, and apart from being heir to the throne, he could have been any corporate executive doing a thing about a thing. 

The second occasion was at the COP-15 environment conference in Copenhagen, at which, as part of a delegation from a corporate sponsor of one of the PoW's worthy initiatives, I stood behind two of my then-company’s middle managers as they jostled for prominence as Charles - accompanied by a vast entourage (lackeys, media people and even his own camera crew) passed along a line, making vacuous small talk. I felt sympathy for him. The price of progressing his pet causes is a daily round of palm-greasing with people he wouldn’t otherwise have time for, while dropping carefully timed bon mots for mild amusement. On neither occasion did I find Charles morose or eccentric, or any of the other barbs aimed at him. But, then, these brief encounters hardly make me an authority.

This raises questions about how much The Crown has faithfully documented the House of Windsor’s dysfunctions over the last 70-odd years, or whether the show is simply a posh version of Dallas or Dynasty (which could have been its alternative title, now I think of it). The truth probably lies somewhere between the two. We have just burned through Series 4 with unbridled enthusiasm, almost to the point of addiction at squeezing in another before bedtime (how box sets should be consumed). After the first two seasons chronicled Elizabeth’s accession and adjustment to becoming sovereign so young, and in a post-war empire, too, with all its political, social and cultural upheavals, the third gave more prominence to the young Charles trying to find his way in the world against the backdrop of Britain’s place in the 1960s and 1970s. Series 4, however, has been the most anticipated so far, ever since Series 3 ended with the mouthwatering prospect of what the next would tackle. 

Firstly, the fourth season has entered the era my age group grew up in, the 1980s, and secondly, it was when the media landscape changed out of all recognition. The Fourth Estate became a different beast entirely in the 1980s: a more deferential press towards the establishment gave way to a more oikish press (no coincidence that a republican Australian owned The Sun, News Of The World, the now defunct Today and even The Times stable). This intertwines, in alternative waves, with the two core elements of The Crown’s fourth season: the marriage of Charles and Diana, and the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. 

I couldn’t ever say I’ve been that bothered about the royals. I’ve got nothing against them and quite like their presence in the national fabric, but I recall the saga of Charles and Diana, played out in the press (and not just the tabloids, either…) for what seemed like the entire decade, as tiresome. Equally, I would happily confess a loathing of Thatcher, no matter what the perceived conclusions might be of her tenure at No.10. I was at secondary school for most of her time in office (she was elected just after I took - unsuccessfully - my 11-plus), and my view of her was coloured, I’ll admit, by the influence of proto-typical, Lada-driving lefty teachers. The Crown’s depiction of her divisiveness is framed through background themes like South Africa, the Falklands War and the miners' strike. Even social injustices, vicariously through the episode of royal intruder Michael Fagan, supposedly discussing them with HRHtQ in her bedroom, brought back many raw memories from my teenage years, and a reminder that the 1980s weren’t all puffball skirts and party balloons on Top Of The Pops. But, then again, the '80s were the decade that defined me: they were the years of Live Aid, of me really discovering music and then getting to write about it for a living, including a spell for Smash Hits, one of the publishing phenomena of the pre-Internet age. I was 12 when the 1980s began, 22 when they ended, a child at the outset, a working man when they came to a close, and already in the thick of corporate politics with a job at Sky TV, having passed my O-levels and comprehensively failed my A-levels somewhere along the way.

Picture: Netflix

The biggest problem with dramatisations of real events is always the casting, and The Crown has been no different on occasion. That said, Olivia Coleman and Tobias Menzies have been superb as the sovereign and her consort, Philip, in the third and fourth seasons, and Gillian Anderson, despite an early tendency to sound more like Steve Nallon’s Spitting Image delivery, has been brilliant. In some respects, taking on Thatcher is one of the more challenging roles Anderson could have accepted. Get it wrong, and it’s hopeless parody; get it right, and you open up all the old wounds again. However, Thatcher shares the limelight of Series 4 with the doomed marriage of Princess Charles and Princess Diana, and I can imagine showrunner Peter Morgan took on the challenge of recreating that with some glee. As much as it evolved into a bubbling sea of acrimonious media froth, with Diana’s tragic adult life played out from the announcement of her engagement until her death in a Paris tunnel just 16 years later, The Crown’s depiction of the near-Shakespearian tragedy of a troubled heir to the throne unable to marry the married woman he actually loved, but instead being virtually forced into marriage with a sweet young Sloane Ranger from landed stock, is as engrossing as it was genuinely sad. Charles’ portrayal by Josh O'Connor does stray into pantomime villainy, and Morgan hasn’t held back from positioning the plant-whispering prince as an embittered control freak. Sadly, this has led to a social media backlash against the real Charles and Camilla. For this season only, Emma Corrin has played Diana with aplomb, not only getting the 'People's Princess' and her dewy-eyed, head-tilted coquettishness, but projecting her vulnerability and isolation and, ultimately, how she was so utterly a square peg in a round hole within Clan Windsor.

There is, of course, much to criticise The Crown for its take on real events. Since Series 4 was released two weeks ago, newspaper columnists and the twittersphere alike have been frothing at the alleged inaccuracies. Some have been valid. No, Lord Mountbatten didn’t write to Charles, on the day he was blown up by the IRA, urging him to do his duty and find “some sweet and innocent, well-tempered girl with no past” to settle down with; no, Margaret Thatcher and husband Dennis were not put through a purgatorial test of etiquette on their first visit to Balmoral in 1979; and, no, Diana wasn’t put through a horrendous rite of passage, early on, at a mob gathering at Buckingham Palace, where Princess Margaret (played not entirely convincingly by Helena Bonham-Carter) is depicted as castigating the novice princess for getting her curtseys wrong (“Spiteful rubbish,” said the Daily Mail). There are many more acts of clear dramatic licence that have brought former courtiers and royal biographers out of the woodwork, as well as those with a more genuine, personal connection.

Picture: Netflix

To state the bleeding obvious, any misconception that The Crown is a documentary should have been brushed away long before people pressed the Netflix button. If you step back from the reality that it depicts a family we all think we know, and filter out the fact that none of us, not even those who may have fleetingly been in the company of an actual royal, have any actual knowledge of what they’re really like, sat around the dining tables and state rooms of their castles and stately homes. But who cares. Who cares if the plot lines are Albert Square transported to Buckingham Palace ("GIT AHT OF MY PALACE!!!) or Coronation Street recreated at Balmoral. It’s engrossing stuff. Yes, a pile of cheese, but as cheese is one of the few things my dietary requirements can tolerate these days, I’ve lapped up every episode so far, and am actually getting quite impatient for seasons five and six (there will be no more after that) to get a move on. 

We’ve spent the better part of the last nine months in lockdown with our own families, ultra-dysfunctional or not, so virtually eavesdropping on a confected version of, arguably the most dysfunctional dynasty on the planet has been a richly delicious guilty pleasure. And I appear to be craving more.