Bella forme: architecture’s urban rock stars

Picture: Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners

I have, on this platform, devoted vast quantities of words to the aura of actual rock stars and the impact of their work, rather than their reputation. Heck, I even named this blog and its predecessor after David Bowie. Almost most of this devotion is the result of the visceral enjoyment of music, as unquantifiable and subjective as that is (Stairway To Heaven might grab you by the balls as equally as it might bore another rigid. Bohemian Rhapsody could well be the most exhilarating six minutes of your life, or it could be the most ridiculous). “I know what I like,” is and should be the philosophical approach to any art form. I bristle at any opinion that takes a superior view of one thing over another. It really doesn’t matter if you enjoy it and someone else doesn’t. Good art is supposed to be divisive. Pop music, photography, sculpture, painting - it’s all the subject to the same individual opinion as architecture. 

35 years ago Prince Charles drew fire for describing a proposed National Gallery extension as a “monstrous carbuncle” at a speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects on its 150th anniversary, providing further evidence of the prince’s then-growing tendency to speak out on pet peeves. It was at the time considered an audacious attack on modern architecture, especially as Charles was largely at the event  to ceremonially doff his titfer to the profession. Instead, he sparked a continuing debate about modernity, leading to inevitable whinges about the legacies that contemporary architects were creating (i.e. anyone veering away from classicism). Notably, Ahrends Burton Koralek’s proposed addition to the National Gallery never materialised.

The reason I bring this up is the death, announced over the weekend, of Richard Rogers - Lord Rogers - part of that triumvirate of rock star architects comprising (Lord) Norman Foster and Renzo Piano who, apart from being great friends and frequent collaborators, made something more out of architecture than simply functional building design. Their work is the creation of monuments to vivid creativity more than merely envisaging rectangular boxes for people to dwell, work in or visit. And yet, collectively and individually, they’ve done more to challenge and enrich contemporary cities than any amount of urban planning. Not always, it must be said, to universal acclaim.

Picture: AEG UK

Of the Rogers/Piano/Foster trio, I’ve probably experienced more of Rogers’ work than any of the others. Indeed just on Saturday night, as his family were processing news of his death, I was at the O2 Arena in Greenwich watching Squeeze and Madness on stage while ruminating on the incredible structure of what, at first glance, looks like a giant tent. 

The Millennium Dome, as it originally was known, was designed by Rogers. It, too, drew the ire of Prince Charles’ aversion to modernism, once calling it a “monstrous blancmange”. Built to celebrate the dawning of the 21st century at a cost of more than £1 billion, it was frequently derided for its cost but also its extravagance as, essentially, a seemingly temporary attraction to celebrate the progress of time by being built in the very place where Greenwich Mean Time was introduced in 1884 (for those who know the area, the Dome/O2 Arena was built on the site of the old Greenwich gas works, at which the father of Squeeze’s Chris Difford worked all his life). But that hasn’t stopped it being one of Europe’s best - and biggest - event venues (and, latterly, a retail centre), which provides a spectacular sight for anyone flying west out of London City Airport, made a memorable appearance in the opening sequence of the Bond film The World Is Not Enough, and several times a week shows up prominently in the EastEnders titles. Some might say Rogers did the job he was brought in for. Even by his standards, however, the Dome was not his most strident creation. 

That probably still falls to the Pompidou Centre in Paris, a building that never failed to fascinate me from the outside as much as its inside when I lived in the City of Light and would frequently walk past it on the way to a nearby shopping district. The building, with its exoskeleton of pipes and what looks like permanent construction scaffolding, was to Paris what punk was to classical music. Paris doesn’t really do modernity (the La Défense financial district was punted north-west of the Périphérique ring road for a reason...). So, in the early 1970s when the process began to design a building in honour of former president Georges Pompidou, the eventual design that Rogers and partner Piano came up with was (and, to some extent, remains) as Marmite as it gets. 

Picture: Amélie Dupont - Architecte: Richard Rogers & Renzo Piano

“Bold” doesn’t even cover the dazzling, colourful and distinctly industrial paean to adventurous thinking, which inevitably drew accusations of consecration from conservative Parisians and snobby critics alike. “Paris has its own monster,” wrote Le Figaro, “just like Loch Ness”. Vindication followed after it opened in 1977, becoming one of the city’s most-visited attractions, drawing seven million people in that year alone - the year of punk, it shouldn’t be forgotten - more than the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre combined (and in marked contrast to the art contained therein). The thing with the Pompidou Centre is that once you get past the avant garde exterior, it serves a practical purpose, providing space for art, music performances and a library. How very liberté, égalité, fraternité. We’re back to rectangular boxes again, but with a clear difference. 

It’s this combination of the practical and the fanciful that fascinates me about the likes of Rogers. Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and Terminal 4 of Madrid’s Barajas Airport are buildings I have spent plenty of time in, sometimes with the freedom to take it all in, at others in a desperate rush to get from check-in to gate. But on no occasion have I ever felt like I was encased in a box. Indeed, without succumbing to hyperbole, these aviation hubs have more than a sense of wonder about them. This is where the jury of the 2007 Pritzker prize, architecture’s most prestigious award,  praised Rogers for his “unique interpretation of the Modern Movement’s fascination with the building as machine,” calling out his transformation of buildings that “had once been elite monuments” like museums “into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city.” 

Cities are where Rogers made his mark, along with Foster and Piano, whom he regarded as brethren, with a shared vision for high-tech architecture that took cues from machinery and technology more than the shaping of stone. All born in the 1930s, they took their influences from the post-war world, in Rogers’ case the ultra-modern house designs of 1950s Los Angeles, which he visited after graduating from Yale (where he first met Foster). Collectively, they transformed  London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and other cities with a similar outlook. “He is my closest friend, practically my brother," Rogers once said of Piano in a Guardian interview, acknowledging - jokingly - how the Italian behind London’s Shard made him one of “the bad boys.” Foster is another, with his stunning designs for the new Wembley Stadium, Apple’s new space-age HQ in California, and the glass dome addition to the Reichstag in Berlin.

You could argue that architecture stopped being sexy in the 1960s and 1970s, just as rock’n’roll was becoming so. Of course, this is a gross generalisation, just as there was as much naff music in those decades as there was era-defining material. What Rogers and his cohorts achieved, as they got to work on urban skylines in the ’80s and ’90s, was the transformation of ‘boxes in the sky’ into something memorable, fascinating even, something to marvel at before entering, and then on leaving, looking back at and marvelling once more.

Today, London’s skyline is still the topic of furious debate, as you peer upstream from Tower Bridge at City Hall and The Shard to your left, ‘The Cheesgrater’, ‘Gherkin’ and ‘Walkie Talkie’ (of which Rogers was not a fan) to your right, even if they controversially obscure Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, one of London’s defining symbols. But one thing you can’t say is that the capital has disappeared “under a welter of ugliness”, as Prince Charles branded modern architecture in a 1984 interview around the same time as his RIBA speech. He also spoke of the “mediocrity of public and commercial buildings, and of housing estates, not to mention the dreariness and heartlessness of so much urban planning”. The irony of Charles’ statement is that these were the very environments that spawned some of rock music’s greatest moments. Transforming them, Rogers - along with Foster and Piano - have injected the sort of progressiveness to architecture that The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Bowie brought to rock. An enduring legacy, in other words.

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. 

Can't wait for Season 21 of The Crown!

Picture: Instagram/@sussexroyal

Finally, we plunged in. After two complete seasons of the media raving about The Crown, with even me living down the road from the Old Naval College in Greenwich (where exterior scenes of Buckingham Palace for it were filmed), my girlfriend and I started bingeing the Netflix series over Christmas. As a battle-hardened veteran of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad box sets, I’ve always been somewhat averse to soapy shows that might appeal more to Hello! readers rather than gritty drama. Even more, I've always been wary of dramatisations of contemporary stories, especially involving actors playing real people who are still alive (they never seem to get the casting right). On top of this, most previous attempts at portraying the royals in film and television have invariably been awful, Helen Mirren in The Queen being a noted exception.

But in we went - and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what we’ve watched so far. The casting has been almost exclusively terrific (standout performances by Claire Foy as the younger Queen Elizabeth and John Lithgow mesmerising as Winston Churchill), but more importantly, there has been less of a soap opera about it all and more an insightful depiction of British and global history in the second half of the 20th century. Episodes in the first two seasons have covered the Second World War, Suez, the Kennedy assassination, the complexities of royal heritage and duty, Churchill’s demise and the prescient scramble to succeed him within the Tory party, and even the suggested Nazi associations of the Duke of Windsor, the abdicated king. Like The Sopranos - and with clear parallels to an established family structure being challenged by modernity and its own moral ambiguities - The Crown has thus far been rip-roaring entertainment and thoroughly addictive. So, given last night’s blockbuster news that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex - Harry and Meghan, to you and me - are to "step back as 'senior' members of the Royal Family" and "work to become financially independent", you wonder how, in future seasons of The Crown, the royal soap opera that has periodically spilled into public life over the last 30 years will be portrayed by the show.

I don’t wish to be flippant. Every family has its rifts, and the Royal Family - while essentially being also a ‘firm’ - is not immune to them. As The Crown has depicted (and, so I’m informed, faithfully), the frustrations Prince Philip had as royal consort and Princess Margaret endured as the Queen’s sole sibling are possibly no different to those Harry and Meghan have now brought to a head. I’m no staunch royalist, but then again, I have no strong feelings about the royal family’s existence. For the most part, they’re good for the nation. It's not defensive PR spin to say that the royals contribute positively to the British tourist economy - you only have to listen to the gushing coming from coachloads of Chinese tourists as they press their noses up to the railings of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle - even if there is an increasing sense of republican scorn (on Twitter, obviously, but also in the readers' comments of the discreetly anti-royal Mail Online). Here, Harry and Meghan have run themselves into trouble. Flying on private jets while preaching about climate change is downright provocative, making the flak they're now facing over living rent-free in Frogmore Cottage (for now) which was renovated at a cost to the taxpayer of £2.4 million, understandable.

However, their very public and, it would appear, premature, flounce from the Royal Family has been coming. Harry has never been a fan of media scrutiny, both because it cost him his mother but also because it encroached on him personally, and by marrying a successful American actress, whose career thrived on publicity, fault lines were increasingly being exposed as he grew further into his 30s, especially with no clear royal role for himself. That the couple chose to spend six weeks out of the spotlight as what has been termed "a break" from royal life, should have been seen as a precursor to last night's announcement, modishly issued via Instagram. Rumours had been circling for a while that they might be considering relocating to Canada, and the sight of the couple on Tuesday visiting Canada House in London to thank the country for its "hospitality" during their Christmas holidays with Meghan's mother should have been a clue as to their mindset. The big shock, however, is that their announcement came without the knowledge of Buckingham Palace. Royal insiders have expressed genuine dismay, suggesting that the Queen herself was blindsided. Perhaps worse, still, not even Prince Charles was aware, a strange situation since you'd have thought his youngest son would have at least floated the plan in advance. The Palace's official statement, carefully written but full of nuance, said that discussions with Harry and Meghan on their decision to step back were "at an early stage" and that: "We understand their desire to take a different approach, but these are complicated issues that will take time to work through." Not only a signal that the Sussexes had jumped the gun, but that their cry for freedom was not going to be relieved easily.

These are, then troubling times for the Royal Family. Not quite existential-troubling, but not far off. 2019 was, in the history of royal anni horribiles, a peach: Prince Philip's actual car crash last January was eclipsed by his second son's metaphorical car crash on Newsnight in November; an apparent rift appeared between Princes William and Harry as the latter broke away from the Cambridge's foundation in June; and, then, there have been continuing attacks on the tabloid press by Harry and Meghan suing the Mail On Sunday over the publication of a handwritten letter she had sent her estranged father. As someone who has spent most of his working life in corporate PR, I know that nothing ever happens publically without good reason. It's normally just a good idea to be in full control. For the most part, Buckingham Palace is normally in control. The Crown has faithfully depicted many of these episodes. The Queen's 2019 Christmas speech, accompanied by carefully arranged and deliberately selected pictures of members of her family - but notably sans Harry and Meghan - was no accident. The Sussexes are said to be less than happy about that. And then the release on Instagram of a staged portrait of the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince George, was a very clear statement of succession, even with Charles standing on a step and appearing taller than his lanky eldest son (Charles is not tall - I know, I've met him). This is being interpreted as part of the inevitable succession of the crown: Charles is said to be thinking of restructuring the family firm, slimming it down and giving it greater social relevance in the 21st century as one of the last functioning monarchies in the world. That process has already begun, effectively, with Prince Philip officially retiring from royal duties last August at the age of 96, and his second son, Andrew, being retired involuntarily following that Newsnight interview. Harry following suit, "while 'continuing to honour our duty to the Queen, the Commonwealth, and our patronages'," reduces the First Team squad even further, though this is a little like Chelsea shedding one ageing player, losing another to a failed drug test, and Eden Hazard moving to Real Madrid.

Few can blame Harry and Meghan for wanting a different life for themselves and their son Archie. Harry, in particular, has had to bear the burden of unwanted attention since birth, inflamed by his mother’s death, and then having to endure living in his brother’s shadow as a young adult. His brief tours of duty in Afghanistan may have given him an outlet for fraternal company, but he was merely following royal tradition (his uncle, Andrew, spent the Falklands War piloting Sea King helicopters as decoys for Argentinian Exocet missiles). What gets under the public skin, however, is money. We pay for the royals whether we like them or not. Choosing to just not be one should be something that is discussed, discreetly. No wonder it has caused the Queen "disappointment and hurt", according to sources. Princess Margaret's portrayal as a younger woman in The Crown as a society player struggling to find purpose as the monarch's sister, holds many parallels for Harry today. The press obsession with his mother (which, incredibly, continues today in the UK's mid-market tabloids) has inevitably and tragically informed his view of how the media has treated his own wife. With, now, a baby son in their midst, it would appear that this particular redhead has conformed to stereotype and gone rogue. Good luck to him, I say. It does make the prospect of future episodes of The Crown even more enticing. Just don't expect Meghan to play herself.