But Will There Be Corgis? Thread Where We Discuss Netflix's THE CROWN

I look forward to future tech facial recognition software that can identity enemies of the people from basic physiognomy and target them for liquidation.

SOMEBODY is auditioning for the role of Professor Higgins in that pic

the queen has no face

Queen Without a Face

A few eps into the new season & so far so good!
Corgis is first ep THERE WILL BE CORGIS

New Philip is the dude from The Terror & Rome, right? Eeerily spot on with his voice.

Colman great obv. HBC’s margaret i havent quite adjusted to, still feels like HBC in nice dresses so far.

Aberfan ep incredibly heartbreaking - I had never heard of it til today.

I've never seen The Crown so I don't know if this is just a sour whinge...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/17/the-crown-tv-brexit-britain

I have seen the show and that seems fair enough

Although citing Colman in the The Favourite as an example of this kind of thing is pretty stupid

it lost me at G Oldman's Churchill performance as "worthy of praise". I can't think of a more cringeworthy, self-indulgent performance that should have got much more derision than it did, and it wasn't like he was a consummate pro putting in a good shift in an extremely shite movie.

Honestly, I think lumping The Crown in with Downton Abbey as a misty-eyed portrayal of a great British past just shows that the writer has not watched The Crown.

Like, maybe it's my Irish perspective, but storylines like Margaret charming the Johnsons in order to get a massive bailout for Britain do not make Britain or the royal family look good. They make everyone look craven and corrupt.

it lost me at G Oldman's Churchill performance as "worthy of praise". I can't think of a more cringeworthy, self-indulgent performance that should have got much more derision than it did, and it wasn't like he was a consummate pro putting in a good shift in an extremely shite movie.

Playing Churchill is a green light for self-indulgent hamming for any actor tbf.

The Crown does a good job of mirroring the viewers prejudices. It can be pro or anti monarchy depending on what you look for in it. Take Phillips speech in ep2 about the impossibility of equality. You can hear Daily Mail readers nodding along while the rest of us are gratified that the sociopathy is laid bare. The cameras point of view in this is strikingly neutral.

Playing Churchill is a green light for self-indulgent hamming for any actor tbf.

Yeah by all accounts Churchill himself spent most of his life "playing Churchill." And he was a consummate ham in the role.

(Insert corny and trite ruminations on "aren't we all just playing the part of ourselves on this great stage of life" etc.)

yes -- and i think it's a bit deeper even than this, as well, bcz the ones who say "let's party and fuck" (who are totally the ones who make sense, even more in the 60s than the 50s, are also the ones where it's obvious that they're doing nothing to justify the colossal privilege: elizabeth's determination is a double one, to prove she can be a satisfactory monarch even though she's a young girl with a very odd and inadequate education (except in the constitution), one that can match up to her dad, and victoria and the other semi-mythical elizabeth, but also to justify the privilege by an iron committment to a selfless version of the duty she owes and the role she must commit to (the dowdiness is an expression of this, like the other elizabeth's quasi-holy virginity)

^^^which is a bonkers insupportable topsyturvy view, but without it, there's just nothing left to ground the wealth and the palaces, etc, as any kind of equitable settlement -- and that's where elizabeth is coming from

re the constitution: she refers to bagehot* when he comes into conversation as "badgett", but her teacher -- a professor with a northern accent, who drinks -- calls him "batshit"... which is not IMO an accident

*(walter bagehot, the 19th centry theorist of the constitution and apologist for the victorian monarchy)

― mark s, Thursday, November 17, 2016 6:49 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^mark s ("otm itt" ― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl)) correctly calling eiir's underbusing of andrew 3 yrs later imo

that guardian article is pretty lame. spretending to be some kind of deep dive into the Crown when it’s mosly generalised waffling and “down with that sort of thing” concern-trolling about...aristocracy period dramas as a whole?

plus we’re pingponging from darkest hour to the favourite to the crown to downton AND to dunkirk?

pick a lane, jesus

Finished S3

Final episode v moving, I do love the way they have written the sisterly aspects of the Queen & Margaret

It's going to be very strange for people when Charles Dance gets blown up at the start of next season and they have no idea why because Northern Ireland has not been mentioned once so far.

maybe they'll introduce some heart of gold, but initially uncompromising Irish nationalist character (like the Welsh nationalist tutor to Charles) who learns to respect these parasitic nazis for what is inside them, rather than for what an absolute horror show they actually are. To make it less awkward when you see Dance/Mountbatten's earthly remains gloriously spraying all over the shop!

Or does that actually make it more awkward? I've not really thought this post through tbh!

yeah there’s def some holes that will need filling in before Dicky’s curtain call.

It must be such a hard show to write, as far as balancing actual history & fictional personal lives & how much history to give & when to deploy what etc.
i heard instead on 1 researcher they have a team of like 4 or 5. Plus the editing process apparently is very bloodthirtsy. Lots on the cutting room floor.

oh and idk if anyone cares but Princess Margaret was on an ep of Desert Island Discs back in the mid 80’s

https://youtu.be/Bi9FtwbU7m0

(i havent listened yet tho)

I hope they have someone tell the popular joke of the time, "Q: How do we know Mountbatten had dandruff? A: They found his Head & Shoulders washed up on the shore".

To be fair to them, I am learning loads about twentieth-century British history from the snippets presented in The Crine. I guess they only present the parts of history that affect the royals directly, which The Troubles probably did not until Mountbatten was killed.

No Royal Family, no Troubles. Discuss.

Cromwell might have something to say about this^

take away that bauble

Find it weird that every other US prez has had a spin on this series, but no one did Nixon. They even had the chance to do it with the hidden-away doco!

The whole Princess Alice story was fascinating to me, I knew nothing about her.

The Princess Margaret episode Desert Island Discs is recapped amusingly in Craig Brown's sort of biography Ma'am Darling. It was a bit of a PR disaster at the time iirc

The book itself is very good and an excellent insight into what a selfish monster she was

Agreed. There was a lot I didn't like about the book (basically I thought the fictionalized elements were bad), but it had a lot of excellent stories about her being completely dreadful. It was also interesting to read about how badly former staff members were treated.

Yeah the fictional elements are skippable (it's glaringly obvious he's straining against the conceit) but I can't imagine anyone who's into this show wouldn't get value out of it

Very true. People would be into it.

It sounds like that new book by Lady Glenconner would be right up Crine fans' streets too. I saw her on Graham Norton, and the stories she tells are A+ royal family craziness.

only caught a couple of episodes of this but it plays a bit fast and loose with historical accuracy. just off the top of my head: to his credit the notorious pederast lord mountbatten didn't consider the coup plot, he rejected it immediately; there's no reason to think that harold wilson knew he had alzheimers when he stepped down as pm, he tried to embark on a media career immediately following his resignation

I learned this the last time I looked up everybody on the show on Wikipedia but Lady Glenconner’s brother-in-law was Alexander Cockburn???

cockburn was married to emma tennant, who is LG's sister i guess?

their daughter was daisy cockburn, and i just found this good quote from her abt her dad: he "loved cobwebs because he thought they were romantic. So she hasn't dusted since he died"

this is my reason also

I don’t dust cobwebs because my cat likes to eat them.

ok i'm going in

i was uneager before what with events but now i'm gung-ho

iirc the Aberfan section is very good but the series is overall pretty meh. I'm not sure about the guy who plays Wilson (some of dialogue with him is good but also mainly terrible) but saying that I've read about 100 pages of the Pimlett biography on him since i watched this and maybe they've done an alright job tbf!

i love Jason Watkins in everything so i was onboard but admittedly i didnt know a ton about Wilson

it opens in sprightly fashion: a flunky realising he has to describe the queen as old to her face (bcz of the new stamp design), helena b-c hilarious as margaret, eiir discussing wilson and communism with anthony blunt (a bit stolen from from a p good play by alan bennett) -- and i'm only 11 mins in

wilson a hard figure to capture and represent i suspect, they just called him "enigmatic", which is correct -- h's become a bit of a strange hole in political histories of the era he dominated (and wrote about, tho i doubt anyone except pimlott ever read what he wrote)

lol at herself sucking up to winnie and he just drops off as she's blathering

"after that it's ma-am -- rhymes with ham"

some of the most contested bad Wilson dialogue from this was him confessing he has Alzheimer's iirc - which wouldn't make sense with the time it was. In his formative years at Oxford he wasn't impressed with poshboy commies like phillip toynbee and initially joined the liberal party (while they were extremely unfashionable and of the verge of extinction) so the bit where it is said the secret services vetted him and he checked out ok would be very true!

iirc he was very aware his mental powers were in decline -- he'd had a formidable memory, and felt it slipping away and decided to quit before it got so bad that it caused him problems

yeah him and his dad both had astonishing powers of memorising and his dad was a human calculator. If he had it at that stage then i'm totally fucked!

it's probably quite a good performance by Watkins tbf

This show drags so much. I’ve been putting it on as background while working and thought I was well into season 2. Nope, episode 7 of season 1.

think the word "mole" is probably more anachronistic than "alzheimer's" actually -- the latter was named as condition in like 1910, though wasn't in wide public usage i think until the mid-80s? (they;d have said "pre-senile dementia" probably)

"mole" went wide in 1974 w/tinker tailor and was presumably a term of art in the secret services before then but the head of mi5 wouldn't just use it unglossed to HMQ in 1965

(i will try and not do this too much, it is a pathology and renders endeavour unwatchable for me)