One will make up one’s own mind, thank you

Picture: Netflix

You would have thought - given the global pandemic - that Her Majesty's Government would have a little less time on their hands to get involved in things that really don't, frankly, need their involvement. But that hasn’t stopped Oliver Dowden, the squeaky-voiced Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who is also a Cabinet minister, from calling on The Crown to carry a ‘health warning’ to make clear that the series is a fictionalised account of life within the House of Windsor.

No sooner had I posted here on Saturday about how The Crown is just a glorious dramatisation of supposed real events and, in essence, is largely a posh version of Dallas or Dynasty, than Dowden told the Mail On Sunday (who else?): “I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact”, adding that while the show was a “beautifully produced work of fiction”, it “should be very clear at the beginning it is just that”. He is planning to write to Neflix to express his concerns further. Environment secretary George Eustice - this morning’s government stooge on the breakfast shows - even added to Dowden’s remarks when asked about them by Sky’s Kay Burley: “It is a very good drama, but it is a drama,” he said, adding that while the show was “clearly based on true events in our recent history” it was clear that it contained “colourful depictions” based on fact. While not the most explicit endorsement of his colleague’s comments, it was starting to sound like a government line. That in itself is a worry. Why should any minister have a view about something so obviously entertainment, while elsewhere there's a deadly virus on the loose and an economic meltdown and rising unemployment resulting from it? It wouldn't have anything to do with a backbench revolt over the tiering system, would it?

Picture: Netflix

If, though, The Crown is, now, a matter of highest importance for HMG, I strongly suggest that Dowden drops the BBC a note asking them to make clear that EastEnders isn’t a fly-on-the-wall series about a Cockerney community in working class London. And while he's at it, a missive should be on its way to ITV asking it to make clear that Emmerdale isn’t about real farming folk. Perhaps, too, an e-mail to Disney to have them clarify that The Mandalorian is, in fact, a drama about a bounty hunter in a galaxy far, far away, and not a hard-hitting documentary about life five years after the end of the facist Galactic Empire in Return Of The Jedi. Which also wasn’t real.

Inevitably, Twitter has piled on. “The Culture Secretary’s ‘intervention’ over The Crown is the funniest thing I've heard in ages,” said one tweet. “Netflix already tells people that The Crown is fiction. It’s billed as a drama. Those people in it are actors. I know! Blows your mind,” said another. One tweet ranted: “I just don’t know where to start with Oliver Dowden using his full powers of headed notepaper to demand Netflix proclaim The Crown is fiction, but maybe a trip round the back of the flat screen to check there aren’t little people living there.”

Understandably, those involved in The Crown have been defending the latest season which, unlike the first three, seems to be closer to contemporary sensitivities because it focuses on a period of history played out in the media unlike any before it. That aside, Series 4 is no different to Series 1-3. Showrunner Peter Morgan has happily described its fictionalised account of real-life events as a "constant push-pull" between research and drama. Josh O'Connor, who plays Prince Charles in the latest run, told the BBC: "Sometimes people will want to believe this is what happened. It's always worth checking in and remembering that we're actors, we're not real and it's not a real story.” 

This hasn’t stopped former royal correspondents from piling in: Dickie Arbiter, the onetime Independent Radio News royal correspondent who became the Buckingham Palace press secretary, has branded the show’s fourth series a “hatchet job” on both Charles and Diana, whose ill-fated marriage forms the series' core theme, along with the Thatcher premiership. Its depiction of C&D's travails stretched “dramatic licence to the extreme”, Arbiter has said. Even ex-BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond has said she feared some viewers might treat the show "as a documentary".

The real worry, for me, is who the likes of Dowden (right) are trying to address with these comments. There’s an implied suggestion that some Netflix viewers are stupid, because they’ve also watched Selling Sunset and The Tiger King (as have I, and never once mistook them for fiction). Worse was that Dowden enraged the Mail On Sunday which, together with its rival the Daily Express, maintains a scary, mad-person-wearing-head-to-toe-Union-Jack obsession with the royals and, even 23 years after her death, Diana. “Viewers of this series,” it thundered yesterday, in total agreement with Dowden, “should never be in any doubt that what they are seeing is dramatic invention by Left-wing persons who do not in fact much like the institution or the family they pretend to portray.” 

Er, right. Let me refer the right-honourable gentleman to my remarks earlier in this post about EastEnders, Emmerdale and the Star Wars universe. They’re not all that deferential to the institutions they portray, either, but no-one’s going to think that there’s a London borough called Walford, and Phil Mitchell has been able to last 30 years as its resident alcoholic thug.