When this series ends, there will be no lament
The Crown Netflix, streaming Tomorrow Tonight RTÉ One, Wednesday Last Week Tonight With John Oliver Sky Comedy, Monday
Despite the fact that it was widely flagged in the media weeks ago, I still wasn’t quite prepared for the scenes of Princess Diana’s ‘ghost’ chatting with the then Prince Charles on the flight bringing her body home from Paris, or indeed another little encounter with Queen Elizabeth on the couch at Balmoral. Laugh? I couldn’t stop.
Writer Peter Morgan explained it’s not her ghost, but a dramatic device to enunciate the feelings of those around her. That’s all every well, but when The Crown already has serious problems with credibility, given that almost all the dialogue is imagined anyway, pushing it a step further just made everything completely risible.
As if that wasn’t enough, we also got a chat between Dodi Fayed, who died in the crash too, and his father Mohamed Al-Fayed who, we were led to believe, was a master puppeteer demanding that Dodi marry Diana.
At the start, when Clare Foy was playing the young queen, The Crown was compelling and seemed to stick pretty solidly to the facts, but the events were long ago and few people alive could challenge the veracity of the drama. Many of us lived through the events covered in more recent series, though, and we can see the artifice a little more clearly, which undermines everything that went before.
The latest episodes – four of ten dropped this week on Netflix with the remainder due on December 14 – were centred on Diana and the seismic fallout from her death. This is familiar territory for Morgan, who also wrote the Helen Mirren film The Queen, and it has the feel of lightly warmed leftovers that already are on the turn.
If any of it is interesting at all, it is the depiction of William and Harry, the young princes whose close bond as children has now been completely sundered, carrying on the great soap opera tradition established by their mother. As this is the last series, we at least will be spared the Cain and Abel angst of more recent developments.
It is a shame the writing has let this final outing down, because everything else about The Crown is impeccable. Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana is eerily real, to the point you sometimes forget it is acting at all, and real-life scenes such as the security footage of Diana and Dodi waiting in a Ritz Hotel corridor for the car in which they will soon be fatally injured are brilliantly recreated.
There is, nonetheless, a whiff of desperation to it all. When this series ends there will be no lament in this corner.
The funniest programme of the week was RTÉ’s Tomorrow Tonight, a hokey imagining of a current affairs programme in 2050 covering a vital UN climate summit. Mark Little cut back and forth to reporters in New York and in the Amazon rainforest, which apparently will have spectacularly regenerated after being handed back to its indigenous custodians.
Much of the science was valid, but the way it was presented often prompted out-loud laughter.
I worked with journalist Harry McGee in 1995 and, to be fair, he looks the same now as he did then, whatever well he’s drinking from. It’s pushing it a bit, though, to imagine he’ll still be looking the same in 2050.
Harry told us that because of the changing climate, the Costa del Curracloe in Wexford was now the nation’s top holiday spot, while scenes shot on Killiney beach showed a dinghy arriving full of climate refugees from northern Spain, where rising temperatures have made life intolerable.
Predictably, we saw the farming of insects for protein, which actually is a thing, but then any semblance of credibility was shattered when we were told Leitrim and Carlow were in the All-Ireland Senior Football Final.
The programme did have one unexpected effect, though, and a hugely enjoyable one it was too. There are lots of middle-aged men on social media who are consumed with anger about the very notion of climate change, and they deny it all as part of a suite of beliefs that includes being anti-vaccination, claiming that the entire Covid pandemic was a hoax, and even resurrecting old conspiracy theories that say condensation trails, literally water vapour, from aeroplanes actually are poison to keep us all compliant and malleable.
The veins in their foreheads were clearly throbbing throughout the show, and very likely popped completely when they heard who was Swedish prime minister in 2050 – Greta Thunberg.
If you ever watch American news channels, you’ll know that most stories are covered in soundbites, without much explanation or context. It is ironic, then, that the most comprehensive deep dives, as the kids like to say, into current events come on what is ostensibly a comedy programme.
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver on Sky Comedy this week addressed the desperate situation in Gaza with a clarity I haven’t seen elsewhere, charting the history of the region and the shameful failures of Western governments, notably the EU, the US and the UK, to demand a ceasefire and an end to the slaughter of children.
It is entirely possible to be utterly repulsed by the Hamas attacks on October 7 and also be appalled by the disproportionate response of Israel in withdrawing fuel, food and water, and indiscriminately bombing densely populated areas.
Oliver is a passionate man who doesn’t mince his words, and his programme was a clarion call to action. Sadly, I suspect his audience already agrees with him, and those who really need to hear the message weren’t tuned in at all.