The Crown goes tabloid
Peter Morgan and the executives at Netflix must have breathed a huge sigh of relief when they got to the beginning of Season 4 of The Crown. No more Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, goodbye Princess Alice and Roddy Llewellyn. Time to bring out the big guns – Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana – and watch the ratings soar.
Season 4 covers the Thatcher years, 1979-90. Lots of big events: the IRA, the Falklands, the Miners’ Strike. More than that, big names and big personalities. And, above all, Diana — the gift that keeps on giving.
Or, rather, the Princess and a few passing references to big historical events. The joy of Seasons 1 and 2 was the balancing act between gossip (Margaret and Peter Townsend, the ups and downs of the Queen’s marriage) and Big History (the echoes of the Abdication Crisis, the premierships of Churchill and Eden, Suez, the Duke of Windsor’s relationship with the Nazis, Kennedy, the Profumo Affair). Most of that has been junked in the early episodes of Season 4. It’s all about Diana and Camilla, with a few minutes on Thatcher’s cabinet reshuffle, axing the posh Wets. The murder of Mountbatten by the IRA is turned into a bit of background for Charles (and Philip) losing a father figure. The Crown has gone tabloid.
What is perhaps most striking about Season 4 is how uninteresting it is, how little original insight it offers. Take Thatcher. In the first three episodes we get the alderman father, the constant work, being a woman in a man’s world, cutting public spending and some nonsense about Denis, straight out of Private Eye. Nothing new, nothing original.
And Diana? A couple of scenes depicting her bulimia, posh-ish Sloane, not very bright, insecure, treated appallingly by Charles and the Royal Family. That’s it. No back story at all in the early episodes. Nothing about her parents.
In the early seasons, the Queen would have asked Tommy Lascelles or Michael Adeane to do some background research. It seems no one did. A quick thumbs up from Prince Philip after a bit of deer-stalking, a game of charades, and everyone’s happy.
This is one of the most interesting shifts in The Crown. The first two series gave a fascinating insight into the importance of the private secretaries: Lascelles, Michael Adeane and Martin Charteris. There are no replacements for them in Season 4, except for a passing glimpse of Charles’s private secretary. This leaves the Royal Family rudderless. The big decisions about Charles are taken by Mountbatten, Philip and the Queen, all brutally depicted as completely clueless about everything and, worse still, simply nasty: snobbish towards the Thatchers and inhuman towards the young Diana.
What saves the early episodes is Josh O’Connor’s superb performance as Charles. After his astonishing appearance in the Investiture episode in Season 3, O’Connor gets better and better. The early episodes of The Crown were a feast of great acting: Claire Foy as the young Queen, Vanessa Kirby as Margaret, Jared Harris as the King, Eileen Atkins as Queen Mary, Alex Jennings as the Duke of Windsor, Pip Torrens as Tommy Lascelles. The casting went seriously downhill in Seasons 3 and 4. O’Connor is the only main actor who is trying to do more than impersonate the character he’s playing and as a result makes Charles more complex and sympathetic.
Olivia Colman as the Queen is the perfect example of what’s gone wrong with the casting. The Queen becomes a vacuum. Peter Morgan gives her nothing interesting to say about anything – Mountbatten’s murder, Thatcher, the crisis in Britain in the late 1970s and early 80s, even her children. She only has two kinds of expression: blank, or smiling in a mumsy sort of way. During the rehearsal for the Charles and Diana wedding, Diana walks past the Queen and Princess Margaret. Olivia Colman looks emotionless. Helena Bonham Carter’s expression is knowing, full of feeling. Oddly, Margaret and Philip, both depicted as monsters in their own way, fill the vacuum that Colman’s cold, empty performance leaves.
You suddenly realise how important the Duke of Windsor, Churchill and Mountbatten were to the early series. They were not only a link to Big History (the Abdication, the War) but thanks to superb performances by Alex Jennings, John Lithgow and Charles Dance, they gave an emotional ballast to The Crown. With the murder of Mountbatten, all three are now dead. There’s no one to replace them, apart from Gillian Anderson’s Mrs Thatcher, and suddenly The Crown goes careering off into the world of Andrew Morton, Penny Junor and Martin Bashir. It looks ominously as if Season 4 will all be about gossip and scandal and knowing looks from Princess Margaret. Netflix and the tabloids will be delighted. Will the audience?
The Crown is currently showing on Netflix
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