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.

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.

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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.

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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.