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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Entertainment
Charlotte Hawes

Charles and Camilla's Tampongate scandal explained as The Crown tackles bombshell tapes

The Crown is set to return to our screens next week with its fifth season as the show focuses on the Royal Family during the 1990s.

The hit Netflix show will reportedly revisit the 'Tampongate' affair involving the then- Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, which was dubbed one of the biggest scandals to engulf the Royal Family at the time.

According to The Telegraph, the drama will broadcast scenes of the intimate phone conversation between the lovers in the late 1980s, as it revisits the scandal 'sympathetically as two young people in love'.

At the time, their explicit phone call was recorded and leaked to the press, causing uproar within the Royal Family.

Actor Dominic West will portray Prince Charles in the upcoming season of The Crown, with Olivia Williams as Camilla, Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth II and Elizabeth Debicki as Diana, Princess of Wales.

But what was 'Tampongate' and what did Charles say to Camilla?

Here's everything you need to know.

What is Tampongate?

Tampongate involved a leaked intimate telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla (Getty Images)

Just three months after Prince Charles and wife Princess Diana publicly separated, an intimate telephone conversation between Charles and his lover Camilla, which took place in 1989, was leaked to the press.

Alongside the leaked transcript was a tape of the full audio.

During the conversation, the then-Prince of Wales referred to being reincarnated as a tampon in order to live inside his lover.

What did Charles say to Camilla?

Charles and Camilla tied the knot in 2005 (Getty Images)

The leaked transcript included the full six-minute conversation between the lovers.

The transcript included the following conversation:

Charles: What about me? The trouble is I need you several times a week.

Camilla: Mmmm, so do I. I need you all the week. All the time.

Charles: Oh, God. I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!

Camilla : (Laughing) What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers? (Both laugh). Oh, you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.

Charles: Or, God forbid, a Tampax. Just my luck! (Laughs).

Camilla: You are a complete idiot! (Laughs) Oh, what a wonderful idea.

Charles: My luck to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on forever swirling round on the top, never going down.

Camilla: (Laughing) Oh, Darling!

Charles: Until the next one comes through.

Camilla: Oh, perhaps you could come back as a box.

Charles: What sort of box?

Camilla: A box of Tampax, so you could just keep going.

Charles: That's true.

Camilla : Repeating yourself...(Laughing) Oh, darling I just want you now.

Charles: Do you?

Camilla: Mmmmm.

Charles: So do I!

Camilla: Desperately, desperately.

When will series five of The Crown air?

Charles and Camilla will be portrayed by Dominic West and Olivia Williams in the next series of The Crown (PA)

The latest series of The Crown will air on Netflix on November 9.

Netflix has been blasted following the news that the series would portray Tampongate.

One Telegraph source described the idea of portraying Tampongate as “crass” and another as “in bad taste”.

Josh O'Connor, who played a young Prince Charles in The Crown's series three and four, said that he would not film the infamous phone call in an interview with SiriusXM in 2020.

He said: "When they offered me the role, one of my first questions was – I say questions, I think it was pretty much a statement – 'We are not doing the tampon phone call.'"

"'[The Crown] was my one chance for my parents to see something [I've acted in] with no shame and there's no way I was going to scuttle that by talking about tampons on Netflix."

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