The Crown: Season 4, Episode 3- Fairytale

 "Whatever love means..."

I need to be careful with this episode. One of the side effects of watching and blogging a Netflix series that is actually current is that one cannot avoid comment on The Crown in the media. Because, I suspect, the fourth season is moving closer to the present, there's a lot more uproar over the fact that the series can be quite damning in its portrayal of (mostly) living royals, and we should remember that this is not documentary but fiction, based on fact but with much artistic licence. We should remember this.

However, Peter Morgan has been quoted as saying words to the effect that, while individual scenes may be fictionalised, the overall effect is "true".

Well... if what this episode shows us about the treatment of Diana is "true" on either level- if- we should set up an, er, new New Model Army, wage war against the Royalists and raise the standard of Parliament. Perhaps Marcus Rashford would make a good Lord Protector of a Second British Commonwealth? 

 This is all, quite rightly, shown from Diana's perspective, as she's forced to live in Buck House while Charles buggers off on a long jaunt. A teenager, a child, an innocent virgin (the royals seemed to insist on that) for sacrifice, whose youth and innocence is nicely shown through snippets of early '80s hits and that nicely conceived cene where she roller skates through those long, wide Buck House corridors with her Walkman, just to remind us that this is 1981 and apparently not some awful feudal past. The bulimia is hardly surprising.

Worse, the pressure of a nation, and beyond, reaches fever pitch. The only person she's able to meet is the worst person possible, Camilla Parker Bowles, in a scene that makes clear that "Gladys" knows "Fred" intimately well and she knows her future husband hardly at all. A sacrificial virgin, indeed.

Her attempts to back out are futile. She has been captured, and the helpless virgin will be sacrificed. Even after she sees that Charles is still seeing Camilla there is no way out.

And she's bored. Alone. Incommunicado with royals out of reach and Bagpuss her only comfort, given lessons in royal flummery by her bitch of a grandmother. Bullied and humiliated as she enters the presence of the royals, embarrassed and degraded as she deperately tried to curtsey to the right arrogant, entitled bastards in the right order. It's enough to awaken anyone's inner Robespierre.

Charles himself does not look at all good here. Yet he himself is unhappy, and himself has no real agency, trapped by what he is into an unwanted marriage to an unworldly child. The Queen's words to him near the end are horrible, about how her grandmother Queen Mary was unable to marry the charming Prince Albert Victor (he of the Ripper rumours, incidentally) after his sudden death, and was then forced to marry his younger brother, the notoriously charmless George V, and endure forty-two years of unhappiness. Christ.

This is gripping, superb telly, and Emma Corrin is extraordinary. It's also utterly horrifying. I've said before that, although I'm a republican in principle, I balk at the practicalities of actually doing it. In 1981, I would have said sod the practicalities. If this is anything like how the monarchy actually was in 1981, its continued existence would not have been acceptable.