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

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)

don't mention moles to HMQ, she'll be getting her gloves on to wring the neck of some poor creature! (obv baseball bat delivered death is purely for commoners)

ok i was getting mildly annoyed at the extensive use e1 had made of a.bennett's "a question of attribution" -- but actually they turned it round nicely and added something (at phil's expense lol)

i like the pace tbh

The theme of the ones I saw in this last series seemed to be how trapped they all were and how we should feel sorry for them (Charles, Phil, Margaret) which was all a bit overdone. Lots of gloomy music as well. Very tedious.

no spoilers

... there's the rub, I have no interest in watching even a millisecond of anything that tries to make you feel sympathy for anyone connected with the Windsors. You will probably not be surprised to learn

ok but cf my reading and counterclaim throughout the thread (viz slapping down tuomas two years ago): it's about eiir's solitude, which/who you only need feel sorry about/for if you feel her decision to accede to the institution is justified or undodgeable (if you think duty is a call that honour can't refuse). i continue to think this is an interesting stipulation for the central character of a modern story, bcz so very unusual and untimely -- and bcz it's classically so clearly the set-up for a tragedy rather than a happy ending, which is (to me) an interesting way to set off into this allegedly pro-monarchy story (as in: anything more hostile or satirical, more superficially anti-monarchy, will be unavoidably much less interesting, not least bcz so much more commonplace as a dramatic choice)

we shall see and i shall say if s3 (as fetter is claiming) swerves wildly in a new direction. as of e1 it very much does not (so philip seems to have become poisonously dislikeable and eiir unfoyishly overeager to slip into fatuous upperclass rumour all round her -- viz that wilson is obviously a communist spy)

Famously EIIR liked Wilson.

she likes him in this show

american stuff honestly continues to be the weakest material (everyone seems to doing bad fake accents)

It's the stuff they choose to leave out that annoys me. Princess Anne is by far the most interesting character but they didn't show her kidnap attempt.

as of e2 it's mostly abt duty vs "let's party and fuck" -- assuming the side currently losing (=duty) will shortly pull something out of its dowdy hat to save the geopolitical day

lol i was wrong and good twist (e2 still): not only is the takeaway that the crown as a institution is fucked up and creates monsters but they actually put more or less these exact words into the mouth of tommy lascelles viz its shrewdest and most pitilessly loyal proponent stroke servant

oof the aberfan ep hit me from a totally unexpectedly angle: i mean i know abt it, i've watched documentaries abt it etc (50th anniversary was 2016). i was 6 when it happened and a schoolchild myself presumably literally at school that day -- in other words in a building of much the same (victorian redbrick) look and in a room of much the same (wooden floors) look and feel (tho infant rather than junior, our junior school was a modern building 10 minutes walk away), and in a rural farming village not a mining village of course.

we didn't get a telly till i was 7 and i don't remember knowing abt it at the time, or at all having to process it as a child (i think i first read abt it and saw pictures in a very up-to-date school historybook when i was abt 12?)

anyway i wasn't expecting to be thinking abt it all from the angle of finding the room they were so familiar and honestly cosy, just before they all die so horribly (i loved my time at that school)

blimey :(

jason watkins can't really do wilson's accent -- which i feel i know better than my mum and dad's, that rolling impish granular grumble (amplified by mike yarwood of course, who actually could do it, even if he was otherwise the least funny man alive)

He's got to be better than John Sessions' attempt in "Made In Dagenham". Sessions, who ended up playing Ted Heath not longer afterwards! I'll bet he was crap at that too.

It makes me feel very old that when I was a kid John "UKIP supporter" Sessions was an up and coming young talent in Porterhouse Blue playing a student!