It is a dreamlike scene. In the latest season of The Crown, Prince Charles, played by Dominic West, looks out at his young and diverse audience seated in a hall on a housing estate. Despite their differences, he says, background music swelling, they share common ground. “I do understand a little bit about what it is to be criticised and judged . . . People out there have no idea who I really am.” The crowd smiles, breaking into rapturous applause.
It is a soapy, sentimental moment, but it shows the shift under way in the 1990s, as the monarchy felt its way from deference to relatability, the great touchstone of our age. This desire to put a human face on sober institutions to win popularity continues today (see Matt Hancock, the former British health secretary, who has just come third in the reality TV show I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!).
Relatability — the leitmotif of the current series of The Crown — is a theme that Peter Morgan, the show’s creator and chief writer, knows much about. What else has the drama been doing over five series if not making the royal family appear human? The approach was initially intriguing and fresh, because events and characters — starting with a young queen taking to the throne with her new husband — were distant. And there is still clearly an appetite for the show, given the media excitement over the casting for the sixth season.
But arriving at the 1990s, the show has run into a critical problem. Many of the events depicted were picked over at the time and subsequently rehashed in the intervening years. The Crown’s loose relationship with facts has been a complaint since it began in 2016, but the controversy has ratcheted up this time around as key characters, including prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, are very much alive and able to object to words being put in their mouths.
So in this season, material that seems incidental — the joys of carriage driving? — have been blown up into full storylines or, as in the case of the royal yacht, have become clunky metaphors. Occasionally, the result is ingenious storytelling, notably the third episode, which shifts perspective and shows the monarchy through the eyes of an outsider, Mohamed al-Fayed. I doubt, however, that this series will persuade anyone to reconsider their views on members of the monarchy.
The Crown has always been about showing the monarchy trying to adapt to successive waves of modernity. In past seasons, the agonies tended to focus on whether duty trumps family, and were hidden behind closed doors. In this series, set at a time of the rise of cable TV, misery lit (notably, Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes) and the confessional interview, the characters grapple with a richer palette of feelings and, to varying degrees, offer them up for public consumption.
Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki) is shown — as we know her to have been — fluent in this new vernacular. Wounded and isolated, she gives journalists explosive details of her life. The drama is more nuanced about Charles, because it shows that, despite him being stiff and buttoned up, he knows change is happening and wants to position the family as flawed and thereby relatable. The “monarchy set ourselves up as an ideal”, he says in a dramatised snippet of his BBC interview with Dimbleby. “The truth is very far from that.” But beneath the pair’s competition for the public’s attention, the drama suggests, is a desire to be understood. Because despite the paparazzi, they do not feel seen.
Since its start, The Crown has shown the personal costs of gilded lives. Watching an ermine-clad character in some palace or other, surrounded by Old Masters, complaining about their burden, I’ve frequently found myself irritated. It is particularly grating as the country battles a cost of living crisis — though there are some delicious moments when the writers show the limits to the royals’ ambition to be seen as human. In one scene, Charles can’t find the kitchen and Diana is unable to cook an omelette.
Morgan fictionalised recent history successfully in his 2006 film The Queen, capturing the way the family misjudged the public mood after Diana’s death. But, perhaps inevitably, there are diminishing returns in going over old ground — unless future dramatists take greater risks.
Emma Jacobs is the FT’s work and careers features writer
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