The Crown: Season 4, Episode 10- War

 "There is no dignity in the wilderness..."

And so the season ends, with two parallel plots- the downfall of Thatcher and the collapsing marriage, that cannot be allowed to fail, of Charles and Di. There is, I suppose, a kind of thematic link that we're encouraged to find, in that both Thatcher and Diana find themselves manipulated by men in grey suits- but the script's attempt to find a parallel seems tenuous and awkward.

So the events of Thatcher's downfall pretty much echo the well-known events of reality, with highlights of Sir Geoffrey Howe's resignation speech word for word (he, a senior Tory, expresses deep regret at the deep damage done to the national interest by fatuous loose-lipped Europhobes- imagine!) and Thatcher foolishly meeting her Cabinet one by one rather than the probably safer option of doing so in a group. But the scenes between Thatcher and the Queen resonate, as the Queen wisely refuses a dissolution of Parliament and as she awards the greengrocer's daughter the Order of Merit while trying desperately to find common ground.

The scenes between Charles- shown here as a total dick- and Diana- shown here as lovely, hugging a young lad with AIDS in an act which helps dissolve stigmas and make the world a better place- don't actually add much. We know the Royal Family wants them trapped in that marriage and sod their happiness if they want to "let the side down". We know also that their unhappiness is in a context of extreme privilege, albeit a privilege entirely without freedom. What's a little newer is Camilla's understanding that she and Charles cannot be together without her being humilated and cast as the villain.

I suspect this season has been just as good as its predecessors, and certainly so more prone to fictionalise history whatever certain commentators may say, but this Charles and Di stuff I find tiresome subject matter, bordering on the tabloidy- and we're getting well into living memory for me. I'm not finding The Crown in the 80s and 90s as fascinating as the 50s and 60s. I may or not watch and blog the next season. We shall see.

The Crown: Season 4, Episode 9- Avalanche

 "Most marriages survive because most people aren't fantasists."

Meh. I'll admit that this episode is as well-written and well-made as ever, but I'm just not invested in the Wales' marital problems, which I recall as tabloid tittle-tattle. Yes, Josh O'Connor and Emma Corrin are superb. Yes, we have an interesting love triangle with Camilla as a nicely nuanced third side, although James Hewitt is not sufficiently developed to make a true love rectangle. It's interesting to see the problem in the marriage is not so much the age difference but the fact that he's an introvert and she's one of those curious extrovert people, more interested in musicals and chart pop than in books and ideas.

There's a real savng grace in Anne though, who is fast becoming a favourite character of mine, the Princess Margaret of her generation and delightfully witty and wise in her balanced and human cynicism. The two highlights here both consist of Anne delivering some home truths- first when she pithily tells the Queen the brutal truth about the Wales' marriage and secondly when she tells Charles, equally pithily, to stop with the self-pity and get on with it. As the Queen says, the marriage of the heit to the throne "simply cannot be allowed to fail". Charles may be a self-pitying spoiled brat, but no one should ever be trapped in a loveless marriage.

Sigh. This is good stuff, I know. Charles in particular is a fascinating, nuanced character. I cant say this isn't very good indeed. But The Crown, over this season, seems to have developed into something that's, well, not my thing. I'll see how the finale goes, but may possibly give the next series a miss.

The Crown: Season 4, Episode 6- Terra Nullius

 “Some countries are too important to send out the understudy...”

This is another clever episode, examining the serious fault lines in Charles and Di’s marriage, and making it clear how appallingly Diana was treated, against a series of breathtaking Australian locations. Yet it’s also the episode that makes it clear, I think, that while we can’t assume Peter Morgan is a republican it’s clear he is unsentimental about that peculiar institution. 

The press are, as I write, full of royalists moaning about The Crown making bits up, and this is an episode where such concerns will loom large.  I’ve addressed this before so let me simply make the point that this is drama, not documentary. That it is fictionalised is implicit in the format, and that should be obvious.

That facts, and memory, are unreliable is even lampshades early on as Elizabeth and Philip describe their 1954 tour of Australia in very different terms to what we saw on screen two seasons ago, claiming that it brought them together. But memory is not all that separates the generations. Elizabeth and Philip thought nothing of leaving their children in the UK for four months; Diana has quite sanely insisted on taking baby William. Yet she’s still expected to leave him alone for two weeks at the start of the tour, something that only she seems to realise would be utterly insane.

And that’s the thing; the royals are not just “tough”, as the Queen mentions at the family conference at the end just after her shocking failure to provide any support or understanding to a desperate Diana: they are a symptom of an elite culture that raises children to be emotionally stunted, damaged individuals. 

Charles, on one level, is the villain here- he shows no chemistry or real affection for his wife, yet he rings Camilla every day. Yet he himself is a victim of his upbringing, and did not meaningfully consent to the marriage any more than Diana.

We are left to ruminate on the irony of man-child Charles and arch-republican Bob Hawke connecting over the fact that both of them, for very different reasons, have their purposes thwarted by Diana. Yet all three of them can be seen as victims of what is, I think, very much presented as a toxic institution.

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.

The Crown: Season 4, Episode 2- The Balmoral Test

 "Well, I think we failed that test..."

That was a fascinating episode, and my fears about potential cosiness from the last instalment are starting to seem unfounded. The metaphor here with the stag- it innocently wanders across a stream into the land of the Royals, is stalked and ultimately shot- is not exactly subtle, but it's clever how the metaphor can be taken in different ways for Diana- enticed into their clutches and captured, and Thatcher- humiliated, and hurries off to symbolically shoot her Cabinet.

Thatcher and Denis are roundly humiliated at Balmoral, with the royals in genetal- Margaret especially- being inconsiderate and rude. Yet there's nuance to their snobbery. Thatcher is unable to relax, have fun, or do anything but work. She's stuffy, resentful, over-serious. One suspects that, tests or not, someone like Harold Wilson, who was most certainly non-U, would have charmed the lot of them. Yes, the snobbery is real, and the way this episode depicts the Thatchers' treatment (the accuracy of this is much-disputed, I believe, but this is television drama, not documentary) is both uncomfortable and hilarious to watch. But it's more complicated than that. 

More broadly, we see clearly how the very non-U Thatcher resents the aristocratic "wets" in her Cabinet, but she isn't necessarily in the right here. The "wets" stand for a time when Conservatives were actually conservative, and more concerned with running things than breaking them. I'm on the Queen's side during their spiky meeting towards the end. But one has to admire the way the script avoids didacticism.

Diana is young, innocent, only eighteen to Charles' thirty-three. Christ. And she's being manipulated throughout, very uncomfortably, into an arranged marriage in which she imagines she could ever be happy. She may pass the "test" with flying colours, being both U and fun-loving, but she's prey. Even Camilla is in on the whole thing. Philip, and pretty much the whole firm, are keen to rush Charles into a marriage he isn't sure he wants with a girl he hardly knows. The scene towards the end, as Diana gets papped for the first time, makes us shudder at where the next seventeen years are leading.

The Crown: Season 3, Episode 8- Dangling Man

 "One doesn't often get a chance to visit a former king. Former kings are usually dead."

An interesting episode here, one that simultaneously looks back to the legacy of the dying Edward VIII and forward to the expected reign of Charles, not less than fifty years in the future as this episode, alongside the new decade, begins. David will not see much of the 1970s.

It is an easy, yet valid criticism here that David's seemingly treasonous behaviour during the War is downplayed. But one cannot criticise the emotional beats, not the performance of Derek Jacobi which is outstanding as ever, as we chronicle the last couple of years of the self-indulgent old fool.

But David is not so much the focus of the episode as awarning of a possible future for Charles, who shows worrying signs of admiration for his great-uncle as well as similar tendencies to meddle, be opinionated, and fail to see the constitutional necessity of suppressing one's opinions- although we should again note that, should Charles not like the requirements of the job, he can always just not do it.

It's fascinating to see the, er, love square between Charles, Anne, and the recently split Camilla Shand and Andrew Parker-Bowles. Anne is delightful here in her chasing and, well, shagging of Parker-Bowles, wittily wrongfooting him into bed and adopting a traditionally male role in bedding a man she rather fancies. Charles, meanwhile, comes across as rather immature at this date with Camilla, at first appearing rather deep with his discussion of Saul Bellow and his line about the state of Prince of Wales being a "predicament" appearing to quote from Alan Bennett's not-yet-written The Madness of King George... only fr this all to be set up to a silly practical joke, That's clever writing, telling us a lot about the character. Josh O'Connor is excellent, and we are again left nervous about our future king.

Elsewhere, Ted Heath is now PM and he's determined to take us into the Eurpean Economic Community: happier times, times of hope, times when Britain looked outward with ambition rather than inwards with a smirk. Yet then, as now, the heir to the throne is a worry. This s good, thoughtful telly.

Victoria: The Green-Eyed Monster

"Am I just an ignoramus who has to have things summarised by my husband?"

A somewhat awkward and directionless episode this time, it must be said, despite the clever use of Othello to examine the idea of jealousy between the royal couple. It doesn't really go anywhere or develop Vicky and Albert's relationship notably more than we saw last time.

Vicky suspects Albert of a somewhat unconvincing infatuation with Ada Lovelace, daughter of the notorious Lord Byron, when it’s clear that the nerdy prince is only interested in her and Charles Babbage’s difference engine. This contrived jealousy subplot isn’t really adding anything, and nor is the rehashing of the old debates about the impropriety of Vicky’s friendship with Lord M. Still, Melbourne doesn’t seem to be as well as he lets on.

Elsewhere we get hints of an upcoming affair between Ernest and Miss Cook, and the Coburgs continue to be annoying snobs. Sir Robert Peel continues to impress with his progressive attitude, a contrast to Lord M, while Vicky is pregnant with a second child so soon after the first.

Much though the A plot may be a damp squib, then, the long-term characterisation and plotting continues to impress, as do the performances and direction. I’m sure things will be back to the usual quality next week.