Bruce's Blog: The Crown - Netflix's often untrue history of the Royal Family

I have a love-hate relationship with The Crown, I love it because it is so well made and acted. The choices of actress and actor have been inspired. The production values are high and the filming is sumptuous. In short, it's great to look at, impeccably acted and very entertaining.

So why hate it? Well I'm no royalist, but I have to squirm at the obvious bias that runs through most episodes - a bias that presents the Royal Family as a whole, and the Queen in particular, as self-interested, selfish and out-of-touch with real life. And in the Queen's case, rather stupid and insensitive at times. The writers clearly don't like their subjects and have an axe to grind. It becomes rather tedious after a while.

What makes it worse is that there is a lot of inaccuracy interwoven alongside the truth, so what seems like genuine "history" is actually far from that, and as many (if not most) viewers won't bother to research this, a popularly accepted but wrong picture of the "truth" about the Royal Family emerges. This is dangerous because people will start to see the real Royal Family through Netflix's distorted lens.

Netflix should have included a large notice before each episode saying that this is "dramatised history" and not everything shown in the series is historically accurate. The Royal Family almost never publicly react to inaccurate portrayals about them - in this Netflix are lucky: other real-life people would doubtless have taken them to court for libel! As Carline Hallemann puts it "[Peter] Morgan is painting a version of history, and he's picking and choosing which moments best highlight his point of view. The events he chooses to leave out of the plot are, perhaps, just as telling as what he includes." [1] And Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins wites: "Laws of privacy, defamation and slander have been built up over years to protect individuals against ever more surveillance and intrusion into personal lives. Most people support them, and increasing numbers use them. The Crown has taken its liberties by relying on royalty’s well-known – and sensible – reluctance to resort to the courts. This is artistic licence at its most cowardly as well as casual." [2]

And here, for the record, are just some of the inaccuracies of the Netflix view of history (I have concentrated more on Season 4 as this is the current season):

Season 1:

In Season 1 Winston Churchill is shown as entirely unconcerned about the impact of "The Great Smog" and it isn't until his assistant Venetia Scott, whom he likes very much, is killed in a traffic accident that he takes any action. Venetia Scott is entirely fictitious, and Churchill's unconcern is borne more out of ingnorance (was was general at the time and not particular to him) [1.1].

Season 2:

In series 2 Prince Philip is depicted as a hedonist where he engages in riské activites and is associated with the Profumo scandal. In fact he was never associated with this scandal in any way and certainly never attended the sex parties as shown [2.1].

In the same series Philip is also shown as an insensitive father who calls Charles "bloody weak" over the latter's struggles at school (Gordonstone). But according to a palace insider, things didn’t exactly play out that way in real life. "The queen realizes that many who watch The Crown take it as an accurate portrayal of the royal family and she cannot change that," the insider said. "But I can convey that she was upset by the way Prince Philip is depicted as being a father insensitive to his son’s well-being. She was particularly annoyed at a scene in which Philip has no sympathy for a plainly upset Charles while he is flying him home from Scotland. That simply did not happen.” [2.2]

Season 3:

Prince Philip becomes fascinated by the Apollo moon landing, and when the astronauts visit Buckingham Palace he engineers a meeting with them, only to be disappointed that they are ordinaryu blokes with no deep thinking about what they have achieved. The idea here, I think, was to show something of the prince's deep thinking character, but it done through fiction because the meeting never took place and he was no more than passingly interested in the moon landing [3.1].

Season 4:

In episode one, Lord Mountbatten writes a letter to Prince Charles telling him why he must get over his infatuation with Camilla Parker Bowles and marry someone more suitable. Although it's true that Mountbatten disapproved of Camilla as a potential wife for Charles, there is no evidence that this letter was ever written [4.1].

Diana visits the Royal Family at Balmoral and is a great success with everyone, even shooting a magnificent trophy stag on a hunting trip with Prince Philip. Whilst it's true she did make a good impression, she had in fact had visits with the Royal Family already, this wasn't her first time at Balmoral, and she did not shoot the stag [4.2].

Margaret Thatcher also visits Balmoral, but unlike Diana, is a fish out of water and hates the experience so much that she leaves early. Again the central truth is correct: Thatcher did not like her visits to Balmoral (she went more than the once shown in The Crown), but there is no evidence she ever left early and the awakward parlour game scene almost definitely never happened [4.2].

When Prince Charles first meets Diana (she's 16 at the time) she is dressed up as a tree for her school play, and whimsically stalks the Prince from behind various items of furniture - this never happened. In fact they met in a field, and were introdcuced by Diana's older sister (who Charles did date for a short time) [4.3].

Of much greater importance in the Charles-Diana story is the place of Camilla. Whilst there is no doubt that Charles did evetually eventually resume his affair with Camilla, he steadfastly insists this was not before 1986; whilst The Crown implies that they never really left off. And although there is a brief period when Charles and Diana appear to try and make a go of things (on their Australian tour), The Crown's portrayal of the courtship and marriage is basically one where the whole Royal Family are unloving, unsupportive and lacking in understanding of Diana throughout [4.4].

For me this is the epitomy of The Crown: it takes a basic truth (Charles and Diana's marriage is unsuccessful) and presents it with a very particular lens that portrays the Royal Family as uncaring and beastly, so support its overall approach to the Royals throughout the series.

Another good example of this is the episode in which Michael Fagan breaks in to the palace and has a cosy chat with the Queen about the troubles of the times under Thatcher, and the "fact" that the Royals are so out of touch. Netflix uses the Fagan break-in as the framework for giving this view of the Queen, but in fact no such conversation ever took place and the Queen actually called in a maid and he was taken out of her bedroom [4.5].