Charles Bannerman: Is The Crown a puree of messy, insulting and sensational untruths?
My television habits are relatively straight-forward. Not being a fan of antiques, cookery, house renovation or dancing Z-listers, not much on channels 1-5 appeals to me.
I therefore largely resort to Freeview whose admittedly many repeats include some excellent documentaries on BBC4 and The Smithsonian Channel. Heartbeat makes my lunchtimes on ITV3, while ITV4’s Professionals, The Sweeney and Arthur Daley still enthral.
Talking Pictures TV offers some great old dramas like Enemy at the Door, The Main Chance and The Onedin Line, with added entertainment from trying in vain to spot the “distressing scenes” and “inappropriate language” flagged up by that channel’s obsession with trigger warnings.
The BBC Scotland channel’s highlight is its repeats of Still Game, even though this is as Glasgow-centric as the rest of its output.
I draw the line at shopping channels but Freeview still provides more than an abundance of entertainment. I was, after all, in P4 when Grampian supplemented The BBC Television Service, prompting my discovery of the channel change dial on the 405 line black and white set.
You’ll have followed that I don’t subscribe to any of these hundreds of channels offering dreadful cartoons and live coverage of Doncaster v Hartlepool. I have, however, become increasingly aware of something called Netflix, through an evidently deplorable historical travesty known as The Crown which started a fifth series this month. This has been excoriated in the papers because it reportedly takes members of the royal family and defames them by inserting them into fairytales of Netflix’s invention.
Now I know that the film industry, especially the American version, is notorious for twisting history. Look at how John Wayne, even from a wheelbarrow in The Longest Day, repeatedly, single-handedly and simultaneously conquered the entire military might of both Imperial Japan and The Third Reich, while the British stopped to brew tea and check the cricket scores.
However, reviews of The Crown suggest that its latest pseudo-historical fiction and downright defamation of our royals plumb new depths. For instance it reportedly depicts Prince Charles attempting to draw John Major into a plot to dethrone the Queen, and Her Majesty attempting to bully Major and Blair into building her a new royal yacht. Then there’s the cynical hijacking of the death of a young distant relative as a vehicle for salacious fiction involving her mother and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Producers have a choice. If they want to make “drama” series involving real people, then they need to stick pretty closely to the events of these people’s lives. And if they want to invent a tissue of tacky fiction, then they must invent fictional characters to convey these tales. They shouldn’t have the best of both worlds, exploiting
real, very famous people as a marketing device and then filling these real lives with a puree of messy, insulting and sensational untruths.
Newspaper previews widely bemoan the enhanced hammering meted out in this series by the Windsors, whose real family lives haven’t even been the most fortunate. No one, especially those unable in practice to sue, should be exploited like this. Inciting an often credulous audience to believe fiction in the worst possible taste by presenting it through the medium of real people is downright immoral.
