Don’t worry: you don’t actually see the death of Diana. The crux of season six of The Crown happens offstage. At the start of the first episode, we find an amiable Parisian taking his dog for a walk by the Pont d’Alma … then he hears a crash. He calls emergency services: there’s been an accident in the tunnel. It’s not exactly a spoiler, is it?
It’s Diana who dominates The Crown, as she did in life. Indeed, Elizabeth Debicki goes one better than the original; she reappears posthumously to tell Charles – on the plane returning home with her body – how he’ll find things easier without her, and then she turns up on the sofa at Balmoral to tell the Queen it’s time to show a bit of emotion. Shades of Blithe Spirit here, and to do Charles and the Queen justice, they take the apparition in their stride.
At the outset, Diana, now unmoored from the Royal Family, is still consumed by her obsession with Camilla; it’s the prospect of Charles’s party for Camilla’s 50th that drives her to accept the hospitality of Mohammed al Fayed at his villa, along with her sons – an oddly convincing William (Rufus Kampa) and a sweet gingery Harry (Fflyn Edwards).
From that, all else follows. There’s a lot for Elizabeth D to capture in Diana, but it’s the mother-sons bond – tender and physical – that she does get across. The young princes aren’t comfortable with all the Fayed bling – “He’s weird”, William whispers about Dodi.
Camilla’s birthday celebration demonstrates the continuing rift between Charles and the Queen. He calls to ask her to come to the party. He has to be announced by a flunkey, and bows to HM before his perfunctory kiss. The Queen (Imelda Staunton does a good job of looking down her stubby nose) is having none of it.
“How can I give my approval when I don’t approve?” she asks, unanswerably. “Two perfectly good marriages to two perfectly good people have been broken up by this.” Just as well she doesn’t attend, because Charles tells Camilla, in front of their compliant friends, “I have loved none but you”. Di had a point.
Dominic West’s Charles – brilliantly nailing the mannerisms and diction – is determined the rest of us should feel the same about Camilla as he does. “This is war”, he shouts at his press people when they present him with more front pages featuring Diana, “and nothing but total victory will do”.
This season is even more plagued than the rest by us knowing what happens. The interest is in how we get there. And boy, Peter Morgan fills the gaps. Mohammed al Fayed – played with scary verisimilitude by Salim Daw – regards his guest Diana as a boa constrictor might view a plump doe, and dispatches his hapless son Dodi (a sweet Khalib Abdalla) to seize this prize, dismissing Dodi’s disgruntled fiancée. If you marry her, he exclaims “you will be a Colossus”.
Directing operations by phone, he quizzes the maid about Dodi bedding Diana; then puts a willing paparazzo on their trail, to get the relationship public. When Diana goes to Bosnia for a landmine charity, there’s only one thing the press wants to ask about. We see her gnawing her fist in frustration back in her room.
The dynamic for this season, then, is evident from the off. It’s put frankly by Mark Bolland, Charles’s PR man (Ben Lloyd Hughes, the spit of Justin Trudeau). “There are two different cultures at play here”, he smirks, looking at pictures of Diana with her foreign playboy. “Scandal – and dignity. Irresponsibility – and Duty. Selfishness – and Principle. The Tabloid Princess – and the Broadsheet Prince.”
And so the drama is played out. Diana appears in the media at play in the Riviera with a vulgar plutocrat; while the Royal Family holidays in tweed at Balmoral with the princes. And when Princess Anne – played by Claudia Harris – notices that William looks miserable, she has a brilliant idea.
“Isn’t it time?”, she whispers to her father. “He’s old enough. Charles had his first at 14.” And she nods significantly to… the head of a stag on the wall. William is taken to shoot his first stag, and the ghillie bloods him – as is the tradition – with the blood of the beast. When the boys return to Diana, she knows the score. “Did they blood you?” she asks William. “Eeew!”
What’s plain is that Diana isn’t happy in her gilded cage, chiefly because of the paparazzi. As they chase her through the streets, her brother’s funeral oration comes to mind: “Diana, the hunter, became Diana, the hunted”. As the episodes progress, she becomes more and more like an animal at bay. It’s not just the professionals, but the passers-by who join the hunt. How, you wonder, can any human being cope? She doesn’t.
Di – and I take the Peter Morgan view – doesn’t buy the offer of happy ever after on al Fayed’s terms. Her therapist, on speed dial in England, agrees: “This is just drama… and it’s addictive”. Dodi is adorable, says Diana, but a bit much – the icky poem he writes is “slightly misjudged… everything rhymes”, including “love” and “dove”. It’s a cultural gulf that poor Mohammed al Fayed never quite got.
She is frankly horrified when things start to get out of hand. “No, no, no!” she exclaims as Dodi sinks to his knee in The Ritz. The crux of the plot is that Diana is not about to be engaged to Dodi when they begin their fatal journey. She wants to be with her boys; her return flight was booked. As a proposition, that seems completely plausible to me.
The other development is in the role of the Queen. Will she respond to the public mood after Diana’s death, as Charles wants, or will she go along with Philip’s view that it’ll blow over, and stay in Balmoral with the boys? Cue Diana’s reappearance on the sofa, giving that lesson of emotional empathy. A bit heavy handed, this, as a device, but you get the gist: Diana has transformed The Crown. The ghost business could grate, but oddly, it works as a way of reinforcing the moral of the series.
Dodi too, does a Blithe Spirit reappearance to his stricken father. “You shouldn’t look up to the West”, he says. Certainly the West looked down on him: we find the Royal Family ignored the flowers and message he sent them after the deaths.
And yet, the Royals come well out of this season of The Crown… the Queen is more obviously sympathetic – and Imelda Staunton does a creditable take on her television address to the nation, articulating the grief; Charles absolutely gets the mood of the people – he emerges as the modern Royal here, reconciled posthumously with his wife.
Debicki, at the right angles, conveys something of Diana’s under-the-lashes look, and something of her charm and class. Diana’s story as presented here is, I think, convincing and compelling; my daughter, 16, however, thought it was completely yuck. There remain another six episodes of this season, but really, with the departure of Diana, the lights have gone down.
