Sitting at my desk watching the trailer for the upcoming season of The Crown for the first time last month, my heart started to race as I broke out in goosebumps. From its opening scene of Windsor Castle burning to Diana’s anguish and the Queen’s despair, all set to a haunting rendition of The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, the show promises all the right ingredients for edge-of-your-seat viewing.
While it is yet to air, the highly anticipated royal drama series by Peter Morgan is easily already of the most controversial releases of the year. While he calls it a “love letter” to the late Queen, the debate has raged for months over whether or not it needs a disclaimer pointing to many of the depicted events as being untrue or if it should even be allowed to air.
Set during the 1990s, the decade offers plenty of family drama that can be used as fodder for our viewing pleasure. It was an era where Queen Elizabeth painfully watched on as three of her children’s marriages imploded in a spectacularly public fashion, a fire devastated Windsor Castle, and the monarchy was almost brought down by the infamous “War of the Waleses.”
Despite a plethora of soap-worthy real-life events, the series seems always to need to take it one step further. Dramatic scenes of the Queen, this time portrayed by Imelda Staunton, embracing Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) in the charred ashes of her favourite home, are fictional.
“1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure,” the Queen uttered at London’s Guildhall just days later. But even her infamous “annus horribilis” speech has been tinkered with and rewritten for dramatic effect.
John Major slammed the upcoming season as a “barrel-load of malicious nonsense.” It is set to show the former British Prime Minister, played by Johnny Lee, caught up in a powerplay as Prince Charles (Dominic West) tries to get his mum to abdicate so he can assume the throne.
“But not one of the scenes you depict are accurate in any way whatsoever. They are fiction, pure and simple,” Major has said in a statement directed at Netflix.
Even Judy Dench has felt the need to weigh in. The actress, who has taken to the screen to salaciously play Queen Victoria twice, made her feelings clear in an open letter published in The Times of London.
“I fear that a significant number of viewers, particularly overseas, may take its version of history as being wholly true,” Dench wrote. “Given some of the wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series—that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence—this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent.”
The backlash has led to the words “fictional dramatisation” being added to the trailer. In a show like The Crown, it’s obvious that certain events need to be compressed or imagined or that symbolism is used to fill in the gaps and keep things moving along.
As we move closer to the present day, however, is there sufficient context to be dissecting the private lives of the royals in such a fashion? Twenty-five years after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, it would be easy to assume we know everything about her life, but this is not the case.
One of the most dramatic storylines this season will involve the Princess’s explosive Panorama interview with Martin Bashir – the one where she infamously said, “There were three of us in this marriage.”
How this interview would have been portrayed on screen when The Crown made its debut in 2016 has significantly changed in just a few short years. At that time, the award-winning 1995 scoop was largely seen as Diana’s “final word” on her life and the monarchy, with the mum-of-two tragically losing her life in a Paris car crash less than two years later. But fast forward to 2021, when Diana’s younger brother Earl Charles Spencer won his two and half decade battle to bring to light the “deceptive means” the disgraced journalist used to obtain the scoop to light, things start to look very different.
In May 2021, the Dyson Inquiry found that Bashir had forged fake bank statements to convince the Spencers that staff, including Diana’s private secretary Patrick Jephson, were being paid by the palace to spy on them. It also found that the broadcaster had tried to cover up its unethical practices.
Following the findings, her eldest son Prince William stated that the lies told to his mother had contributed to her sense of “fear, paranoia and isolation” during her final years. He also argued that the tell-all had created a “false narrative” and that it should never be aired again due to its questionable legitimacy. The interview is set to feature as a major storyline during two episodes of the upcoming season.
Diana’s close friend, Jemima Khan, came on board to help out with the script for the events that will be shown in this and next year’s instalment of the series. However, in November 2021, the philanthropist cut ties with the show as she felt the story wasn’t being handled “as respectfully or compassionately” as she had hoped.
Over the next few years, there may be even more things to come out from this era that change how we perceive it. But as they say in show business, all publicity is good publicity, with the controversy only heightening the anticipation around the drop, which is sure to be ratings hit. While I have reservations and concerns about the season and whether it should even be aired, you can guarantee I’ll still be tuning in on 9 November to devour it.
There is something about the drama that is impossible to turn away from.
