The Crown: bad PR for the monarchy?
Having watched The Crown, this much I know: Balmoral is not my dream staycation, said Holly Thomas on CNN. In the new series of the Netflix drama, Margaret Thatcher has become prime minister, and must go and stay with the royal family in Scotland. There, she faces the Balmoral Test – a series of assessments, mainly involving the “capacity to tolerate mud and indecipherable parlour games” – to determine whether a newcomer is acceptable to the clan.
She hates it: her “limited ambitions of getting a bit of work done” and sharing a bed with her husband are “thwarted at every turn by the bullish snobbery of her hosts”, and her own ignorance of the “rules”. Diana Spencer also visits. Aged only 19, she is similarly meanly treated, but being “posh”, she knows the rules and fares better – which shows what a bad test it is. As this season makes all too plain, Diana’s life in The Firm was a misery from day one.
Across the world, millions are watching this series – and some commentators are appalled by the impression it creates of our royal family, said Max Hastings on Bloomberg. They say it exploits a group of people who cannot fight back – and they leap on errors of detail. The Queen is too buxom; Prince Philip would never shoot pheasants in August. But The Crown is great drama, and even if it’s largely invented, it points to a central truth: the royals are one of the “most dysfunctional families on the planet”.
But its errors are not just in trivial details, said Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. It implies, for instance, that Thatcher opposed sanctions in South Africa because of her son’s business interests there. It gives a skewed perspective of history, and that really matters, as it may be the only history its viewers imbibe. Young people aren’t stupid, said Ellen Lister in the same paper. We know the difference between fact and fiction: working out which is which is part of the fun of The Crown.
And it is not all bad PR for the monarchy: it has got people talking about the royals, and it gives a sense of the pressure they’re under. We see that with their privilege comes real sacrifice, said Sarah Ditum in The Guardian: time and again, they forego their own happiness to preserve the institution. It’s admirable, but terribly sad.