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

xp

it's a good season. The Die and Charles show is a drag at times but then amusing when he gets pwned by the Aussie pm and his own mum for being a pathetic self-absorbed drip who everyone but Camilla despises!

I will be interested to see if any good articles get written by people young enough to not really remember the whole Diana story beyond her being dead now. Obviously as a fifty-year-old person living in the affected islands, the whole thing is such a part of the fabric of my life, I could never watch the show with any kind of distance or objectivity, but I'm curious about whether the programm is as loaded or foreshadowy as we all think it is, just because we know what it's foreshadowing, and what it's loaded with.
I wouldn't have thought it was possible not to know the details, but I heard John Mulaney and Nick Kroll talking to Pete Davidson on Oh Hello, the P'dcast about it, and he only had the very vaguest idea of who Diana even was. I know he's not exactly renowned for his razor-sharp brain, but he can't be the only one who doesn't really know about her.
Even when they were talking about it on Gogglebox the other night, and they were playing the scene from the engagement press conference, all the parents knew what Charles was going to say before he said it, because it was such a big deal at the time. I don't really remember that at all.

I'm not a "remember where you were ..." sort of person, but I happened to be at a concert when the singer stopped in the middle of the set to offer thoughts and prayers for Diana, so now I'll never forget.

My wife notoriously forgets about shows she's started, sometimes for years at a time (she has a lot on her mind). She did, however, pick up on all of the praise for Season 4 of The Crown so decided to dive back in. I'd heard good things, too, and decided to join her. She got it started downstairs while I was cleaning up after dinner and I met her a few minutes later. I plop down on the couch, and there's Claire Foy, mourning the death of the king. "Must be a flashback," I say. A few minutes go by and they are making funeral plans. "Weird," I say. "This is pretty long for a flashback; you'd think they covered this stuff pretty thoroughly back in the first season." A few more minutes and she's meeting with Churchill and talking about the future coronation. "This definitely seems pretty strange for a flashback," I say again. "It's been 20 minutes or so and it's covering stuff that just had to have been covered already. Isn't Gillian Anderson supposed to be in this as Margaret Thatcher? Are you ... sure you're watching Season 4?" "I *think* I'm sure," she says, not at all sure. "Why don't you check?" I suggest. And indeed, she was midway through ... Season One, Episode 3, which is as far as she'd made it years before.

Needless to say, she was pretty embarrassed. We belatedly started Season 4, Episode 1, and it seemed pretty good! But she fell asleep 10 minutes in.

i caught myself in old-age nostalgia when they cut the wedding short & i was all WHAT THE FUCK. I think i honestly had somehow thought they’d do the whole thing? which is obv insane & unnecessary lmao

had weird deja vu moments during Aus episode, the footage of them with baby William on the blanket w Uluru in the background was on the news & telly & all the womens mags that my Mum & my Nan bought ... and in my mind’s eye even now weirdly blends w images of Lindy Chamberlain (lol) - and that gala where they danced! My barbie had a dress v similar so i just thought she was like some kind of fairytale lady, the absolute bees knees

When I was about 8 my Our Lady of Lourdes junior school classmates all met Diana at the Irish centre in Huddersfield. I didn't as I was excluded from the trip for being naughty, boys hoo!

boo hoo stupid fucking correct autocorrect!

My main memory of Diana is her being relentlessly and mercilessly ripped to shreds, denigrated and insulted by the British press up till the second she died and thereafter it being punishable by death to say anything critical about her.

“... never stopped me though.”

They've done a fantastic job in the show of highlighting the age difference between her and Charles. The only thing that I can say in defence of people at the time was that she never actually looked that much younger than him (or maybe that's just the photos they chose to publish). She was just as tall (and taller in heels), and that Sloaney fashion style made everyone look middle-aged.

yeah i dont think i ever had a sense of how young she was at the time ~at all~

The “You’re Wrong About” podcast did a good series on Diana that includes a lot of stuff i’d never heard that revealed more of her as a human who sometimes did some not-great things. **Like pushing her elderly stepmother down a flight of stairs**

But also underlines the clear fact that Charles was an island of a man who could not relate to her in any way shape or form & was deeply resentful of her popularity (as was the rest of the family)

Like imagine in an alternate universe where the royal family were completely diff people who had put resentment & jealousy aside & maybe drafted off her popularity to help their image & reposition their role lmao what a conceot

the paedo's princess

lol

i had to doublecheck he was in his early 30s when they married, i'd remembered it that he was 42 and she was 18 😬

She looked 42 and his emotional age was 18.

uncle dickie coached him well

Dickie's last note to Charles : I think I'm about to get my bollox blown off by the RA - don't be a massive paedo like me. Or am I getting this wrong way round.. Yeah I meant to say do be a massive posh paedo twat like me!

I wouldn't have thought it was possible not to know the details, but I heard John Mulaney and Nick Kroll talking to Pete Davidson on Oh Hello, the P'dcast about it, and he only had the very vaguest idea of who Diana even was. I know he's not exactly renowned for his razor-sharp brain, but he can't be the only one who doesn't really know about her.

Pete Davidson was minus 11 years old when some rich cunts from a weird island a long way away from his island got married! I'd be startled if he has much stronger a grip on the details of the American equivalent though, the starcrossed romance between King Bill Clinton and a blushing young staffer when Davidson was 2. (George St Geegland and Gil Faizon should definitely interview him again to find out.

Which episode of this has fake Australia in?

the ep is called Terra Nullius

or ep 6

bellow won the nobel prize which is exactly the kind of fact i wd expect the more diligent royals to have absorbed and processed for regurgitation in the kinds of cultural conversation the front-facers have to have -- so in this narrow sense he has certainly heard of bellow

― mark s,

Sure, but quoting from one of Bellow's more obscure and earlier novels a passage so DON'T YOU SEE in is aptness struck me as ridiculous.

This is the piece I was looking for about his intellectual enthusiasms:

The canniest of these flatterers, and the one who had the most lasting impact, was Laurens van der Post, a South African-born author, documentary filmmaker, and amateur ethnographer. He dazzled Charles with his visionary talk—of rescuing humanity from “the superstition of the intellect” and of restoring the ancients’ spiritual oneness with the natural world—and then convinced Charles that he was the man to lead the crusade. “The battle for our renewal can be most naturally led by what is still one of the few great living symbols accessible to us—the symbol of the crown,” he wrote to the Prince. It’s no wonder that Charles was seduced. The life of duty opening up before him was a dreary one of cutting ribbons at the ceremonial openings of municipal swimming pools and feigning delight at the performances of foreign folk dancers. Here was an infinitely more alluring model of princely purpose and prerogative.

Under the influence of van der Post and his circle, Charles began exploring vegetarianism, sacred geometry, horticulture, educational philosophy, architecture, Sufism. He received Jungian analysis of his dreams from van der Post’s wife, Ingaret. He visited faith healers who helped him uncork “a lot of bottled feelings.” Staying with farmers in Devon and crofters in the Hebrides, he played at being a horny-handed son of toil. He travelled to the Kalahari Desert and saw a “vision of earthly eternity” in a herd of zebras. On his return from each of these spiritual and intellectual adventures, he sought to share the fruits of his inquiries with his people.

Over the years, Charles has set up some twenty charities reflecting the range of his Bouvard-and-Pécuchet-like investigations. He has written several books, including “Harmony,” a treatise arguing that “the Westernized world has become far too firmly framed by a mechanistic approach to science.” He has sent thousands of letters to government ministers—known as the “black spider memos,” for the urgent scrawl of his handwriting—on matters ranging from school meals and alternative medicine to the brand of helicopters used by British soldiers in Iraq and the plight of the Patagonian toothfish. He has given countless speeches: to British businessmen, on their poor business practices; to educators, on the folly of omitting Shakespeare from the national curriculum; to architects, on the horridness of tall modern buildings; and so on.

ta calz!

I've got vague or possibly even fake tabloid paper memories of Aussies in the crowd loudly cheering and clapping when Charles injures himself falling off his horse!

It's fun watching fictional Charles getting increasingly jel that Diana is massively popular with Aussie plebs and finally getting completely crushed when bob hawke says something like "she's probably set back the Australian republican movement by 20 years, I thought you'd do a job for us just by being yourself"

Prince Charles 'asked New Zealand to stop making fun of him for falling off a horse'

(he had fallen three times in six weeks, most recently in Sydney)

sic - Hawkey gets the Richard Roxburgh treatment & it is v chef’s kiss

I noted you saying so upthread, yes, that's 30% of my interest!

btw total sidebar on the Hawke tip but you might somewhat enjoy the Angus Sampson / Leigh Whannell collabo film The Mule, a drug smuggling comedy set across the time the '83 America's Cup race is on TV

maybe "does prince charles read novels (apart from harry potter)?" can be my debut quora query

my alg there is already totally fucked for no reason i can discern, it will at least drag it away from dumb questions abt chernobyl

xpost oh hell yes, i will investigate! love both those guys!

I watched the Australian episode and: 30% good job, 63% lol at faking Australia*, but holy shit is this terrible writing. Does Morgan always do the all-exposition all-the-time dialogue?

QUEEN: "As you know, the Australian Prime Minister is an ex-unionist who believes it is time for a republic. Perhaps this trip will win hearts and minds among the colonies."

AUSSIE PM: "As you know, [GOOGLE NAME OF A SECOND AUSTRALIAN LATER, IF YOU HAVE TIME BEFORE FLYING TO VIENNA TO VISIT YOUR FIVE PRINCE AND PRINCESS CHILDREN. LEAVE BLANK OTHERWISE], I reckon it's past time we became a republic. This jug-eared bastard might turn the tide for us by parading around the joint."

QUEEN: "One hears that she is becoming popular with the heathens whom one desires to continue owning."

CHARLES: "You're becoming bloody popular by clinging to that baby!"

DIANA: "Maybe I'm becoming popular BECAUSE I'm clinging to that baby, who is my son. And yours!"

AUSSIE PM: "As you know, you jug-eared bastard, I reckon we ought to become a republic. But that woman has become bloody popular parading around the joint. Have a beer, I know you must also possess a growing jealousy toward her that will escalate in future episodes."

* the CGI'd Sydney Opera House was hilairs: characters in the foreground in focus, crowd of thousands in background out of focus, enormous building behind the crowd somehow magically in focus again. I guess they just went with the first result on Shutterstock?

prob not the best idea to watch that one episode & nothing else? lmao

a lot of the dialogue is expositiony bc they dont assume the audience knows or remembers much of anything
i think maybe also bc overall timeline for the show is pretty truncated

but it is honestly not an impediment to enjoyment of the show or at least not as big of a deal as you make it out to be

Until the Falklands War, Gillian Anderson, sorry, is just awful. I know she's playing a caricature, but the Thatcher I've watched in dozens of videos and read about wasn't this dry plank: she knew how to flirt and charm even if the queen paralyzed her.

This is a poor SNL parody.

how dare you use those words to describe Thatcher

the drier the better i say

she knew how to flirt and charm even if the queen paralyzed her

Lol, also greatly enjoyed Bob Hawke and the mention of his status as a former Guinness Book of Records holder for skulling a yard of ale, which iirc he was doing in public up until his death?

Without waving away every valid thing you wrote -- everything, by my estimation -- dramatically we have to understand why Thatcher worked, in the same way Reagan did, and, maybe I'm the American responding to her secondhand through YouTube, bios, and the news after 1987 (i.e. when I came of age), but, even acknowledging her problem with women, the Anderson take is TOO self-conscious.

"everything, by my estimation" = all valid

like, Anderson's Thatcher comes off as a Greer Garson rendition of Margaret Thatcher, yet what I've seen Thatcher was rather good at constructing this role.

I think perhaps the producers were wary of being seen to soften her image, certainly there’s a big swathe of people even just in the UK who like/are interested in the royals but despise Thatcher to this day. Not sure if you’ve seen the coverage over here (no reason why you should, really), but tons of Tories are having their piss boiled over it because they think the portrayal is too unsympathetic. Again, though, I take your point but I think you are focusing on the wrong reasons why she won people over - her image was a part of it, but it was her hardness and decisiveness that a certain type of person responded most to.

lol I'm communicating poorly. Until the Falklands episodes, her hardness is laughable -- a goon show caricature. And, yes, I know, many will say YES THAT'S HOW SHE CAME OFF but Gillian Anderson comes off as a person who's studied what people wrote about Thatcher. I understand the meticulousness with which Thatcher constructed her poshness, but certainly in America Thatcher, like Reagan, came off as a thorough Gatsby-esque fabrication; the seams didn't show.

i heard a podcast interview w the creator & he said Anderson often takes many months/years to develop a character

ie the voice she did as Thatcher was noticeably much improved that in post production she volunteered to do some ADR on her initial episodes

i think she grew into her performance overall as the season progressed

anderson's thatcher is great. the harshness and fragility, the self-consciousness that hides behind self-righteousness, this is not just a performance of a human being but a whole economic and moral outlook. she's playing thatcherism.

the performances are tremendous this season. and of all of them, helena bonham carter is the best.

charles wins it for me, lizzy close second

they're all very good. i find myself feeling real anger toward him due to his cowardice and selfishness.

emma corrin's diana also incredible. very understated, really.

I wonder if it helps that she wasn't around for this when it was happening.

Unfortunately people of my age remember it too well.

I realize I've never heard Charles speak a single sentence, and I've grown up with him.

Is that accent real?

legit

Lol, also greatly enjoyed Bob Hawke and the mention of his status as a former Guinness Book of Records holder for skulling a yard of ale, which iirc he was doing in public up until his death?

He set the Guinness Record for a yard as a 26-year-old Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1955, quit booze flat for his entire parliamentary career (1980-91, set a zero emissions by 1995 target before getting knifed out), and returned to it gradually afterward. He would publicly skull a glass deep into his eighties to entertain randos, but just with regular schooners (375ml), not the yard glass he'd made his name with (1400ml / 2.5 pints / 91oz?).

Here he is being handed a cup at the cricket and taking it to the dome in ten, aged 82 or so:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2skct9