The Crown: Season 4, Episode 8- 48:1

 "That was impressively c*nty..."

I must admit that, while this season maintains the high quality we've seen from The Crown since the beginning, and this episode for one is typically excellent although with a few , I'm afraid my interest is waning because of the subject matter. The '50s, '60s and '70s felt like history but this season, gradually focusing into my own remembered lifetime, feels more like tabloid celebrity tittle tattle- Charles and Di and, as here, Fergie and dodgy Andy. As a television drama it's still intelligent and excellent as ever, but the subject matter is grabbing me less.

This episode, however, addresses a serious constitutional question: what if a monarch truly comes to loathe a prime minister, and breaks the habit of a lifetime by subtly allowing this to be known- just this once? The matter is particularly acute as the key to the disagreement is the very clear moral need for sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Thatcher's stubbornness is not shown in a good light here. Still, while far from a Thatcherite myself, I must say that the script sets out to portray her in a bad light, heartless and arrogant. The Queen and Thatcher are paralleled throughout, with the Queen consistently shown in terms of her love of the Commonwealth and that speech in Cape Town on her 21st birthday (a nice touch, and lovely to get another scene with Claire Foy) dedicating herself to altruistic service, whereas Thatcher is made to say that she believes in encouraging people to look after number one, and only then to their neighbour. Still, she's right about the Commonwealth including several dictators with

One could argue that Thatcher is portrayed in a bad light here. One could also reasonably argue that her actual opinions don't seem to be misrepresented from what I know of the woman, and that those opinions were callous and ignorant. However, the episode tries to find a balance in the use of the character of Michael Shea who, having advised the Queen against making her views known, does so on her orders- and ends up as scapegoat having had his honourable behaviour highlighted by the script. This doesn't seem to reflect reality, and seems to be there to provide some sort of moral equivalence, although it's well done. But, while there are plenty of examples of royals being brutally unfair to their employees, in this case it appears to be entirely made up. I don't mind artistic licence, or facts being shaped to fit dramatic needs, provided the underlying truth is portrayed, or an attempt made to do so, and I've defended the programme before on such grounds. That doesn't seem to have happened here, however, which is a shame.

We also have some nice dialogue between the royal siblings on the occasion of Andy's wedding, as Charles arrogantly dismisses his siblings as "fringe" and earns the above splendid quote from Anne. His schadenfreude at his mother is, of course, a delight.

So, a well-structured episode with some nice character stuff, especially between the Queen and Thatcher, whose relationship has pretty much collapsed. But I don't like the use of events that didn't happen to provide balance.

The Crown: Season 4, Episode 4- Favourites

 "Our children are lost..."

Hmm. There’s a lot to admire about this episode and much that is interesting- not least our first glimpses of how they’re going with the characterisation Princes Andrew and Edward. But I think, structurally and thematically, it’s a bit of a misfire and doesn’t really work overall, despite some impressive character scenes.

This series is, of course, drama and not documentary, and therefore entitled to balance factual accuracy with dramatic licence, as we’ve often discussed. It’s not unusual, in The Crown, for the chronology of events to be altered a bit so that events coincide where this was not the case in reality, generally as a way of making a character point. This is generally fine. But, in this episode, it’s so obviously done that you can see the joins.

There are three separate threads to this episode- the Queen realising she doesn’t know her four children as well as she probably should; the useless Mark Thatcher getting lost in the Sahara; and the early stages of the Falklands crisis.

Still, the relationship between Elizabeth and Philip is dealt with well, as is the weirdness of Charles, his self-centredness and Diana’s very worrying depression. There’s also Anne’s unhappy marriage and jealousy of Diana’s popularity, and we learn that Edward is an arrogant, entitled git and Andrew a charming pervert, at least the versions we see here.

Most interestingly, though, we see how blatantly Thatcher favouritises her son over her daughter out of probable preference fir the opposite sex, essentially because she worshipped her father and had issues with her mother. This is fascinating.

And yet, good though the character development is here, the structure is just too artificial to hang together. It’s a good execution of a flawed concept.

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.