Television
I wonder how long it took the executive producers of The Crown to realise Olivia Colman was quite hopeless as the Queen?
She can’t stop being Olivia Colman. When she carefully arranged her face, to convey the Queen’s stern blankness, I fully expected her to burst any moment into prolonged hysterical laughter. She was miles away from the mysterious, quivering impassivity Claire Foy managed.
Then there was Helena Bonham Carter, who played Helena Bonham Carter. There was absolutely no attempt to remind us she was meant to be Princess Margaret. Not that slavish impersonation is what was wanted – but I do expect an evocation of the spirit or essence of these people, not caricature and camp.
It was truly awful – full of misfires. Charles Dance did Mountbatten as Vincent Price, plotting a palace coup. The Queen Mother was a meddling old charlady. The Anthony Blunt sequence, involving concealed identities and shadowy images in Old Masters, was lifted from an Alan Bennett play.
Sir Jacobi portrayed the dying Duke of Windsor as the Emperor Claudius. Which reminds me – when Charles Laughton attempted the role of Claudius, in an aborted film, to get into character he listened over and over to a recording of Edward VIII’S abdication speech.
Jason Watkins rather stole the show as Harold Wilson. Erin Doherty was a forthright and surprisingly sexy Princess Anne. Michael Maloney was astonishing as Edward Heath, forlornly playing nocturnes on the piano. Which reminds me of another story: a Conservative lament throughout the Shires in the early 1970s was why on earth did they have to put up with, as leader, the frightful old nancy Edward Heath, when the Liberals were fortunate to field that fine, upstanding gentleman Jeremy Thorpe?
The message that duty always comes before love, sympathy and personal feelings, and imagination and opinions are things to be eradicated, was rubbed in somewhat.
As a South Welshman, I took offence at the way the Aberfan disaster was used as a backdrop for the Queen’s alleged emotional deadness – but, as Hugo Vickers has been teaching us, historically speaking The Crown is complete balderdash.
If not invented, the particulars are all falsified. The chronology is warped. Jane Lapotaire may have been very moving as Alice Battenberg, but she was shown giving press interviews several years after she’d croaked.
The result turns the series into soap opera, the Royal Family lurching from one difficulty to the next. But on the other hand, given the way the vain and lazy, real-life Prince Andrew made his notorious appearance on Newsnight, and his accuser, Virginia Giuffre, starred in Panorama, perhaps soap opera, after all, is indeed the correct genre when it comes to these people.
The descriptions of private Caribbean islands, endless parties and massages, nightclubs, pizzas in Woking and disco dancing in the West End with notorious playboy Jeffrey Epstein were sheer Acorn Antiques, not excluding convenient memory loss. As bitter tears were shed and the cameras rolled, I couldn’t help
but think of Mrs Overall, who famously said to Miss Babs, ‘Attempting to murder you was just a silly way of trying to draw attention to myself. I shan’t need to do it again now you’ve bought me this lovely blouse.’
Elizabeth Is Missing might well describe Olivia Colman’s performance, but was the title of a Glenda Jackson drama. Most of us will remember Glenda as Gloriana, with her imperious raddled loneliness, in Elizabeth R, half a century ago. Half a century on, she was playing a similar role – an old lady whose mind is disintegrating, the loss of her only friend triggering confused memories of another disappearance: that of her pretty sister, back in 1949. It was a sort of detective story for the Alzheimer’s era, with scraps of recollection, and shuffled scraps of paper, photos and clues. How fractured life becomes at the finish. Glenda was great.
The Arena documentary on Jonathan Miller showed him at his twinkling, brilliant best, talking about opera, painting, the history of medicine, philosophy and molluscs. He had the ability to link everything up, find parallels and metaphors – steam pumps and the human heart, industrial furnaces and blood fevers.
It is tragic that, as dementia undid him, Miller fully believed he’d failed, that he ought to have remained a doctor and never have succumbed to acting the giddy goat on television and in the theatre. Despite a knighthood, he was convinced he’d gone unrecognised. He was always my hero.