There appears to be an awful lot of people out there who have it in for The Crown, the Netflix series about the Royal family which goes out of its way to make clear that it’s a drama. One newspaper today declares that its creator, Peter Morgan, “neither sought nor received the consent of King Charles before choosing to disect his entire life”. Well, funny that. Would you?
The latest uproar is about an episode that suggests Charles tried to get the then PM, John Major, to persuade the Queen to abdicate. That’s clearly not true. But the real sin of the series is, I’d say, not what it gets wrong but what it gets right. One of the charges against Morgan is that he makes out that Prince Philip was unfaithful. Well, those rumours have been around for years across newspapers and books. Even innocent souls like Gyles Brandreth mention, in his biography of the Duke, all the possible candidates before concluding that there was nothing in it. Specifically, the series features Penny Knatchbull, described as Prince Philip’s carriage-driving companion. I can’t remember when I’ve been less surprised.
The thing about the Royal Family is that its members’ activities are quite often hair-raisingly at odds with the home life of our dear late Queen.
But for anyone who lived through the Diana era, the problem for any drama is actually to convey the hair-raising actuality of that living soap opera. I remember reading aloud to a highly respectable lunch party the text of Charles’s phone conversation with Camilla where he said some eye-raising things, and thinking that no one could have made this up. Netflix left it out.
Diana’s feelings about her husband’s relationship with Camilla didn’t have to be surmised; she made them clear. There really wasn’t much scope for fiction. Indeed, it’s hard now to convey the shock of all this for a society which had invested so wholly in the fairytale marriage. As for the Duchess of York...
Naturally, the royals would prefer this to be forgotten. What the critics don’t take on board is that people can take this in, and still respect the monarchy. Netflix holds a mirror — not wholly a distorting mirror — to the royals, and if we don’t like the image it may be that we’re deluding ourselves. Or maybe memories are short.
