The media's angry that The Crown isn't accurate. Since when was The Daily Mail bothered about accuracy?
I intend to complain about Winnie the Pooh's inaccurate portrayal of depression in donkeys.
Netflix’s sumptuous — I believe you’re legally required to use that adjective to describe it — Royals rutting and tutting drama The Crown has displeased certain sections of the media for two reasons:
They consider the latest series to be ‘inaccurate’
It’s awfully beastly about their beloved Monarchy.
My views on monarchy would be best described as somewhere to the left of Robespierre, but I love The Crown because, despite foolish attempts to humanise the shower of shit that makes up the British Royal Family, the show never fails to show them for the vacuous rat fuckers they really are.
Season 4 is particularly pleasing as it lifts the rock and reveals the squirming insect truth of Prince Charles’ despicable treatment of Diana, and more generally the Royal Family’s inability to shake its addiction to treating ‘love’ as something you can grow in a petri dish in the pantry.
Charles and Diana barely knew each other before they were plonked in front of a doddering Archbishop of Canterbury burbling on about the whole deal being “the stuff fairytales are made of…” He was not entirely inaccurate as the fairytales of Hans Christian Anderson are a treasury of grotesque cruelties and blunt moral lessons — quite similar to the real history of the Royals actually.
That’s a member of the House of Lords and a former advisor to Boris Johnson openly kvetching about… a TV drama. What’s particularly ludicrous is that Tim ‘Montie’ Montgomerie believes the portrayal of Thatcher in The Crown is “hateful”. It bends over backwards to humanise her and is as fair and even-handed as any portrayal of her that I have ever seen.
But to Timbo, who believes the arts to be stuffed with frothing at the mouth Marxists rather than people who just loved music and movement in nursery a little bit too much, the only acceptable presentation of Thatcher would have been as a 50ft woman stomping Europe before popping round to his to tickle his balls with her stilettos.
For The Daily Mail which has just had to give up its push to put Martin Bashir in an early grave over the Diana interview, The Crown’s treacherous decision to show the Royals for the stupid, venal, unpleasant lot they really are is beyond outrageous. So outrageous, in fact, that it and MailOnline, its online slurry trough, keep pumping out story after story about it.
Far be it for me to traduce the professional reputation of a newspaper group that salivates whenever a young celebrity is nearing the age of 16, considers any woman walking outside to be ‘flaunting her curves’ and has used the phrase ‘all grown up’ so many times I’m surprised a judge hasn’t ordered its hard drives checked, but the Crown conflab is all about clicks and eyeballs. The Daily Mail and MailOnline’s editors are addicted to Chartbeat and other analytics software and they know The Crown does big numbers, which is why they are writing about it incessantly. Injecting a healthy dose of bile and controversy is just the Mail’s MO.
And as for the Royals, particularly Prince Charles, talking about cynicism and the family’s ‘reputation’? That’s ludicrous. Charles’ younger brother Prince Andrew palled around with a paedophile, long after Epstein had been first jailed, and still will not cooperate with US law enforcement agencies. I hope his ‘sweating condition’ is fully cured now as it would be very unsightly should he ever be obliged to wear an orange jumpsuit. Meanwhile, Charles himself interferes incessantly in government business with his notorious ‘black spider memos’ — so named because his handwriting, despite so much expensive schooling, is atrocious — and notoriously told his now-wife Camilla that he wanted to be her tampon. Very classy man, Charles.
Ever since they slunk onto television with The Royal Family, a documentary masterminded by Prince Phillip in 1969, the Royal Family have been engaged in a very modern act of narrative building. People sneer at the Kardashians, but they have nothing on the Windsors, who have been creating characters out of real people for decades, and whose huge staff of flunkies dedicates much of their time to dropping tidbits and stories into the hungry mouths of tabloid hacks.
There is nothing invented in The Crown that is remotely as embarrassing as the Royal Family’s own actions. And being fairly up on the history of the Windsors, I find The Crown to be fairly honest and true. Where Peter Morgan, the writer of the series, slips off into fiction, what he offers in his scripts is emotionally true, something that Autons like Tim Montgomerie will struggle to understand. And disrespectful to the Queen? It’s hardly the Sex Pistols drawling God Save The Queen, is it?