Don’t knock Netflix! We’ve got The Crown to thank for gems like this
The comedian Nish Kumar, latest in a long line of presenters on Radio 4’ s News Quiz, took a little dig at Netflix in the show last week.
The BBC has its own streaming video service with iPlayer, he said, plus three national TV channels, six national radio stations, a multitude of local services, a worldwide radio channel and several world- class orchestras. Netflix has exclusive rights to The Irishman, a secondrate Martin Scorsese movie. he’s right about the orchestras.
But if Nish thinks Netflix isn’t forcing change on the BBC and every other broadcaster, he’s very wrong.
The evidence was there on Inside the Crown: Secrets Of The Royals ( ITV). This four- part series is impeccably researched, with acerbic commentary from experts such as biographer Piers Brandon — who remarked tartly of Princess Margaret’s toyboy, Roddy Llewellyn, that ‘ he clearly had assets of which we can know little or nothing’.
Our only justification for speculating about Roddy’s own crown jewels is that his decadent affair with hRh on the Caribbean island of Mustique features in the latest series of The Crown, on Netflix.
This royal drama, starring helena Bonham Carter as the gin-sozzled princess, re- enacts the scandal from every angle. And that gives the much more respectful broadcaster ITV plenty of leeway to rake over old headlines.
‘We love hearing about their sex lives, their financial crises, we can’t get enough of it,’ said journalist Penny Junor. What we like most, though, is hearing those stories from new perspectives, and the best of these came from Margaret’s lifelong friend and her lady-inwaiting, Lady Glenconner, now 87.
Lady G didn’t think much of Madge’s husband, the hedonistic photographer Antony ArmstrongJones, and she let us know it. her father, she said, referred to him as ‘Tony Snapshot’.
She and her husband owned Mustique and gave a patch of land there to Mr and Mrs Snapshot in lieu of a wedding present. Margaret loved it. Tony didn’t: ‘he called Mustique “mistake”, which was rather tiresome of him.’
More smashing stories came from the veteran royal photographer Ken Lennox, who explained how Princess Di could be persuaded to pose when caught in the right mood — and how he once caused a national crisis by catching her unawares. Ken described standing up to his chest in the sea, with a long lens ‘like a drainpipe’, taking pictures of Diana on a sun- kissed beach wearing a bikini, when she was four months pregnant with William.
To his surprise, these astonishingly intrusive and insensitive shots didn’t go down well at the palace. he was lucky not to be speaking to us from The Tower.
Former Labour shadow chancellor ed Balls was speaking to us from a Polish coal mine, the back of a German taxi and a French shooting range on his Travels In Euroland (BBC2). his mission is to discover why voters are turning to populist parties.
ed’s at his best when he gets stuck into a political discussion, as he was with a German MP who wants to expel immigrants even though his wife is Turkish.
The fact that the BBC is so comfortable with ed says a good deal about the corporation’s unconscious bias. The BBC insists it holds no political stance, but it’s impossible to imagine that Nigel Farage — no longer an MeP after today — would be invited to present a documentary like this.
Maybe Nige could do a series on the history of the British pub. But I honestly doubt the Beeb would have him.