THE CROWN
Some people will have watched the new Netflix series
of The Crown in a one-day binge. I’ve taken a week.
In the pre-publicity I thought that Olivia Colman
still looked like Olivia Colman but minutes into Episode One I totally accepted
that she was the Queen, every bit as
much as Claire Foy before her. She has caught perfectly that air of haughtiness
and slight discomfort that Her Majesty has never quite shaken off. I’m not so
sure about Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip: Matt Smith seemed a better
look-alike somehow, though he actually wasn’t. Helena Bonham Carter is spot-on as Margaret: needy, greedy and totally self-absorbed. Ben Daniels is well cast
as Snowdon and despite looking nothing like him Charles Dance makes a credible Dickie Mountbatten. Josh O’Connor bears little resemblance to a young Prince
Charles but he grows into the part well. When Emerald Fennell first appeared as
a potential girlfriend I thought she was Sarah Ferguson, as she looks more like
Fergie than Camilla, but Camilla she is, playing her as a sort of junior
Margaret, promiscuous and manipulative.
The series has produced some fine moments, though perhaps
not as many as the Claire Foy episodes, and one or two surprises. The series
highlight was the Aberfan episode with its vivid CGI recreation of the slagheap
engulfing the village school, though I rather doubt the Queen would have admitted
to faking a tear after meeting the bereaved at Aberfan. Anne bonking Mr
Parker-Bowles was a bit of a shock, as was Sir Anthony Blunt threatening Philip
with some unwanted publicity if he (Blunt) was outed as one of Cambridge Spies.
Did Mountbatten and the Queen Mum really ‘conspire’ to break-up Charles’s
puppy-love affair with Camilla and accelerate her marriage to Parker-Bowles?
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Helena Bonham-Carter and Ben Daniels as the Snowdons - a marriage not made in heaven |
Which raises the obvious question: is some of this
royal ‘docu-drama’ factual or fictional? We’ve been down this road before with
the Helen Mirren movie and more than one screen version of Diana’s life and
loves. The writers this time seem to have toned down Prince Philip’s alleged
philandering, which was such a feature of Kitty Kelley’s scurrilous book about The
Royals (1998), and there were ‘revelations’ there and elsewhere that (so
far) have not made into The Crown.
I’m as fond of a juicy piece of gossip as the next
person, but I wonder how fair shows and movies like this really are. I’m sure
Her Madge and the senior Highnesses don’t watch it, but it must be mortifying
to the younger royals, whether they see it or not, to know that all their
friends are tittering over the lives (especially the sex lives) of their
parents and grandparents.
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Prince Andrew: not exactly helping |
You could almost argue a case that the Royal Family
need a #MeToo movement to restore a bit of their right to privacy. In trying to
modernize the institution, the Queen has perhaps allowed us to let too much “daylight”
in; the “magic of the Monarchy” is getting a bit tarnished. Prince Andrew, of
course, is not exactly helping.