By Sarah Gristwood

Published: Wednesday, 09 November 2022 at 12:00 am


As The Crown moves into the 1990s, it was always going to have a hard row to hoe. The events of those years are at once too shocking and too familiar. What seemed pleasurably entertaining when the events depicted were safely in the past seems tone deaf once they come within the collective living memory. And that was even before a sinkhole opened up right in front of the plough; the Queen’s death in September 2022, and the transformation of Prince Charles (previously broadly viewed as fair game) into His Majesty King Charles III.

Why are some people criticising The Crown’s new season?

Everyone has joined in the chorus of disapproval. Former prime minister John Major proclaimed his outrage at scenes in the first episode which have him (played by an oddly-cast Jonny Lee Miller) listening, reluctantly, to Charles (Dominic West) suggesting his mother should abdicate in his favour. (Typically for The Crown’s use or misuse of factual detail, the Sunday Times poll prompting the suggestion was not invented – but the presentation of it was skewed.)

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Former British Prime Minister John Major (left) and Johnny Lee Miller as John Major in The Crown. (Images by Getty Images/Netflix)

In a rare moment of political unity, Tony Blair (who succeeded Major as PM in 1997) has likewise declared the portrayal of his relationship with the royals as lacking any validity, and former minister Michael Heseltine declared it was “important” that they spoke out. Actor Judi Dench called for a disclaimer at the start of the series saying it is “fictionalised drama”. The closer it comes to the present day, she wrote in an open letter to The Times, “the more freely it seems willing to blur the line between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism”. The newspaper themselves weighed in, with a prurience not altogether sanctioned by their own past reporting of the Royal Family. The series has become “a monstrous perversion of itself”, the Daily Mail declared. The debate has become as much the story as anything we see on screen.

The party line from those involved in the production is that yes, of course there are challenges. Discrepancies in appearance between actor and character stand out more clearly, when we all have the reality lodged in our mind’s eye. The wave of opprobrium itself has made us less willing to suspend our disbelief. But, so show creators say, recent events have only increased public interest in the royal family; and in any case, showing the characters as human only increases public sympathy. Hmmm. Maybe.

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Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana and Dominic West as Prince Charles in episode one of season five of The Crown. Does showing the royals as human increase public sympathy, asks Sarah Gristwood? (Image by Netflix)

Of course, the fact that so many of the leading characters are still visible and vulnerable puts fire in the belly of this controversy. It ups the ante, exponentially. At what point does story become the comparatively safer history? The Walter Scott Prize for Written Historical Fiction defines the genre as anything set 60 years before publication; by those standards the first season of The Crown, kicking off in 1947 and shown 2016, is safely within the category. But we’d have to be watching Season 5 in the 2060s for the same cordon sanitaire to apply.

The issue of ‘fake news’

There is however, another, broader issue; not entirely related to the fact that the events portrayed took place so recently. An issue about the relation of historical fact and fiction. At what point does free-spirited drama tip over to fake news – or false history? The rights and wrongs of what Antony Beevor called “histotainment” was widely debated regarding, for example, The Tudors – though no-one from Henry VIII’s court was in a position to be hurt. While this season of The Crown is arguably trespassing not only against history but against common humanity.

The War of the Waleses – obviously the main plot line for a season covering the 1990s – is of course a matter of extensive public record; but The Crown’s carefully precise recreation of the notorious Panorama interview with Princess Diana (a startlingly convincing performance from Elizabeth Debicki) has to be seen in view of Prince William’s expressed hope it would never again be seen. Another major plot line is the friendship between Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) and Penny Knatchbull (Natasha McElhone) – who would indeed be one of only thirty mourners invited to Philip’s funeral last year. But in exploring its implications for Philip’s relationship with the Queen (a correctly downbeat performance from Imelda Staunton, The Crown must juggle the tempting opportunities for psychodrama with what history records as an enduringly successful royal partnership.


On the podcast | Are period dramas damaging history? Fern Riddell and Nicola Tallis discuss issues of accuracy and ethics raised by recent historical dramas, including The Crown and The Lost King: