I love Netflix, but . . .
I love Netflix. I loved The Two Popes. I adore Schitt’s Creek. Last night I finished watching The Queen’s Gambit, an amazing, moving, masterly mini-series that you must MUST see. It’s about chess – and life. And it works even if you know nothing-zero-zilch about the game. The Queen’s Gambit is fiction, based on a 1983 novel by Walter Tevis, but it feels totally real. Bizarrely, by contrast, The Crown, based in part on real events, feels quite unreal.
I am often asked about The Crown, especially by people from America – partly because I’m known to have written a couple of royal biographies, but also because Princess Diana features in the latest series wearing a fun jumper (what Americans call a sweater), and my partner-in-knitting George Hostler and I created a number of fun jumpers in the early 1980s that Diana liked to wear. (She bought them from a shop in Kensington Church Street in London, just around the corner from Kensington Palace. You can find one of them here: www.gylesandgeorge.com )
About 20 years ago, when I was writing my first royal biography, I interviewed the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen’s husband, and I remember him saying to me then, “The media are turning us into a soap opera.”
You can see exactly what he meant if you watch The Crown – it’s a very glossy soap opera, beautifully made but definitely a soap opera.
I enjoyed the first series of The Crown, despite the odd inaccuracy, but as the series has continued the show has moved more and more from the world of fact to the realms of fiction.
Of course, the series doesn’t pretend to be a documentary. It’s a drama. Events and conversations have to be invented. The writer has no choice: he wasn’t there! And those who were there are not likely to be telling him what was actually said and done by whom and how. The imagined scenes and conversations can make for entertaining telly, but can be hurtful and frustrating if you’re one of the real people involved. And it’s worrying if viewing audiences think it’s all true. It isn’t. It’s somebody’s creative take on reported events. It’s a soap, it’s not history.
Shakespeare wrote Richard III. It’s full of historical inaccuracies and it’s a bit of a hatchet job. But at least Shakespeare waited until all the people involved were dead.
The trouble here is that these people are alive and for some of them it’s distressing to see a distorted and inaccurate version of their private lives played out on TV as entertainment.
To be honest, since you ask, I much prefer The Windsors. It’s closer to the truth! (Seriously, The Windsors doesn’t pretend to be telling us the truth – though Harry Enfield’s Prince Charles is uncanny!)
I haven’t got in to this latest series of The Crown. I don’t think I can face it. The trailer I’ve seen was too depressing. It features Mrs Thatcher having an audience with the Queen. Mrs T’s voice is so improbable and what she is saying is so preposterous that I knew it wasn’t for me.
That said, each to his own. I just hope the millions who are watching The Crown are enjoying it for what it is – a de-luxe soap opera: the fabulous Pink Camay of soap operas!
The royals, I’m sure, will just rise above it. I don’t think the senior royals watch much TV and I know The Queen and Prince Philip don’t watch films about themselves. They’re not interested. They really aren’t.
Perhaps at the beginning of each show Netflix should add a disclaimer: ‘This is an imagined drama loosely based on real events.’ And at the end: ‘Only a few real royals have been hurt in the making of this programme’.
PS. My royal biographies are out of print, but I’ve found a few copies in the basement at home, so I’ve signed them and put them up for sale in my new online shop: https://www.musicglue.com/gyles-brandreths-old-curiosity-shop/