The Crown makes my blood boil – the show has got King Charles all wrong, says royal photographer Arthur Edwards
IT is one of television’s most controversial shows – loved by fans for its wild depictions of royal sex and scandal but denounced by historians for playing fast and loose with the facts.
Now The Crown – which is set to return to Netflix next Thursday – promises its most provocative series yet, as it portrays the final days of Princess Diana, played by Elizabeth Debicki.
Creators have paid meticulous attention to detail and spared no expense getting the sets and costumes just right. But some experts have taken issue with the storylines, which they say are a long way from reality.
Does it really matter, though, that “recollections may vary”?
Here, our veteran Royal Photographer Arthur slams The Crown’s unfair depictions and casual approach to the truth, while TV editor Rod McPhee praises the show’s scrutiny of Britain’s most famous family . . .
YAY!
I HAVE spent more than 40 years watching the Royal Family up close.
Their lives have been dramatic to say the least, so why does The Crown insist on making things up that never happened?
I watched the first two series and there is no doubt that it stars some great actors and the scripts are well written.
But I had to give up watching because the fictitious scenes they added made my blood boil.
I just wish they would put up a disclaimer that some of this is not true.
But I don’t think that is likely to happen. According to Netflix, the day before she became Queen, Princess Elizabeth, played by Claire Foy, and Prince Philip, were charged by an elephant in the Kenyan bush.
Philip, played by Matt Smith, stared the animal down until it turned away.
Total fiction. Just like the claim that the Queen did not want to go to the Welsh village of Aberfan, where the local school was engulfed in mine waste, killing 116 children and 28 adults in 1966.
Fast forward and the Queen is seen berating Prime Minister Tony Blair for scrapping the Royal Yacht Britannia. She did shed a tear when her beloved ship was decommissioned. I was there in Portsmouth the day she said farewell.
But the truth is SHE approached PM Harold Wilson in 1968 and offered to give up Britannia to save money at a time when defence spending was being cut.
I am told the Queen never watched The Crown — and I totally understand why.
But what really annoys me is the awful way the programme treats Prince Charles, now our King. The Crown is shown all over the world and, thanks to this show, millions of people will believe that Charles is sulky and miserable. He does not deserve it.
If King Charles could meet everybody in person he would be so popular, because they would see he is not like that at all.
There is a scene in The Crown where Charles lobbies Prime Minister John Major to get rid of the Queen and let him become King.
‘Repeating debunked allegations’
Sir John completely denies it ever happened and described the series as “a barrel-load of malicious nonsense”.
Whenever I saw Prince Charles with his mother they were fantastically warm.
I remember, at the Diamond Jubilee, he called her “Mummy” and kissed her hand.
You don’t do that to someone you are trying to get rid of. Charles once said to me: “I never, ever say ‘when I’m King’ because that’s when my mother dies.”
I was there in Northolt, West London, when he came back from Scotland after his mother’s passing and got off the plane. He was grief-stricken.
Part one of series six, which starts next Thursday, deals with the events of 1997, when Princess Diana was killed in Paris with her new lover, Dodi Fayed. But this time writers have even added in a scene where the Queen is dreaming and apparently dreading the day she would have to hand over the throne to her son.
We also see Princess Diana coming back as a ghost, and Dodi’s father Mohamed Al-Fayed constantly claiming she was pregnant when she died in a crash he alleges was an establishment plot to kill her.
They are repeating allegations that have been well and truly debunked.
Part two, shown from December 14, covers Prince Charles’s relationship with Camilla, now our Queen. She has been portrayed as a marriage wrecker. I photographed Camilla when she was chaperoning Diana at the races in Ludlow, when Charles was competing.
She was always charming, even when she was cast as the other woman she would always be friendly and smile through it.
This week I covered the State Opening of Parliament and saw her sitting there next to the King. He looks just right with his partner there.
He takes all the heavy load and she supports him in everything he does. I think it is a terrific marriage and I just know our country is in good hands at the moment.
We have lost a great queen. Charles will be hard pushed to become as popular as Queen Elizabeth, but he is doing his very best.
The monarchy is in a healthy state — no thanks to The Crown.
NAY!
Says Rod McPhee, TV Editor
EVER since King Harold copped an arrow in the eye in the Bayeux tapestry, people have been chronicling the adventures, and misadventures, of the British royals.
The difference is that history was always written by victors like William the Conqueror, so we’ve always got a regal version of events.
Well, not any more.
And thank goodness, because what shows like The Crown do is present a more rounded, accurate view of the Royal Family.
If it were left to them, we’d only see them opening community centres, doing friendly walkabouts and presenting awards to the worthy.
We probably wouldn’t ever find out just how much of a Nazi-sympathiser King Edward VIII was; that the Queen Mother’s family had Her Majesty’s cousins with special needs hidden away in a hospital for decades; or that Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was implicated in a coup to overthrow the British government.
All of the above feature in The Crown, with varying degrees of evidence to back up the claims. The argument will always be that they aren’t just an institution that comes under justified scrutiny, they are a family who deserve privacy. But they can’t have their cake and eat it.
Remember that it was the Windsors who thought it would be a good idea to make the 1969 documentary Royal Family, which went behind the closed doors of Buckingham Palace.
You’ll also recall Princess Anne on Parkinson in 1983 and It’s A Royal Knockout in 1987, plus Prince Charles’s 1994 interview with Jonathan Dimbleby in which he admitted having an affair.
And that’s before we even get to Princess Diana’s Panorama interview in 1995, which took airing dirty family linen to a whole new level.
All of which is fine. We now understand they are flawed humans like the rest of us.
‘No drama is faithful to truth’
But you can’t then complain when dramatists decide to rummage through the same dirty laundry while putting their own spin on events.
Much is made of The Crown’s sensational aspects, but nothing they could make up would eclipse the family’s real life twists and turns.
Imagine if, just 30 years ago, someone had written a show in which the once second-in-line to the throne became mired in sex abuse claims, which he strongly denied; or that the future queen would one day be killed in a car crash; or that the future king would eventually marry the woman he’d had an affair with for decades — and be loved for it.
No one would believe it.
Besides, no drama has ever, in the history of TV, been 100 per cent faithful to the truth. Not one.
Some facts will always be contested by someone, and everybody knows that. We don’t need a warning that it isn’t all entirely true, and the people who call for that are the same who constantly moan about us living in a nanny state.
Should we never produce any dramas unless we can inconclusively prove they’re all true?
Also, why should politicians, pop stars, freedom fighters, actors, comedians and ordinary members of the public who have extraordinary things happen to them feature in TV shows and films, while the royals do not?
They are arguably the most famous family on the planet and enjoy extraordinary wealth, power and privilege.
And I actually believe they understand that the intrusion which programmes like The Crown represent is the price they pay for all that.
The Netflix show doesn’t just focus on the negative aspects, either. Anyone who watches it will be left in no doubt that the Queen was an incredible woman who devoted her life to public service, and that King Charles is a sensitive, thoughtful soul forced to give up his true love in favour of marrying Diana.
They’ll also see that from a tangled history has come a monarch, and an heir in Prince William, who are modern, relatable and popular.
The Netflix show ultimately tells the success story of the Royal Family — it just doesn’t shrink from showing its failings too.