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| 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.
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| Picture: Netflix |
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.”
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| 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”.
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| 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.
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