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U.K. government minister asks ]The Crown’ to add disclaimer
Will The Crown give into pressure, and insert a disclaimer at the start of every episode about it being a work of fiction? The British government has now intervened and suggested it do precisely that. Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden told The Mail on Sunday: “It’s a beautifully produced work of fiction, so as with other TV productions, Netflix should be very clear at the beginning it is just that. Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.”
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Dowden, the Mail on Sunday reports, is likely to write to Netflix suggesting it runs a disclaimer at the start of every episode.
The Mail said there is “deepening concern” that The Crown is “doing lasting damage to the monarchy and Prince Charles in particular.”
This is a drama, not a documentary though, and so definitions of “fiction” and “fact” are not clear-cut. The royals seem to be more anguished over certain scenes that have been necessarily invented, rather than the generally non-disputed truth that Prince Charles and Princess Diana had a difficult marriage; and that Charles always loved Camilla. Perhaps they are more pained by seeing past traumas return to haunt them, and so have decided to go after The Crown on dramatic inventions rather than its presentation of general truth.
This trashing has not dented the show’s global viewership of 29 million people. But the royals remain furious. A friend of Prince Charles told the Mail on Sunday: “It is quite sinister the way that (series creator, Peter) Morgan is clearly using light entertainment to drive a very overt republican agenda and people just don’t see it. They have been lured in over the first few series until they can’t see how they are being manipulated.”
Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, told ITV he wanted a disclaimed at the beginning of every episode: “It would help The Crown an enormous amount if at the beginning of each episode it stated that, ‘This isn’t true but is based around some real events.’ Because then everyone would understand it’s drama for drama’s sake.”
The criticism ignores that The Crown is also sympathetic to the royal family, and makes them living, breathing human beings of different character shades, good and bad—we see the royals behaving in all kinds of ways, in a far more nuanced fashion than the family itself has ever presented themselves to the British public who, after all, pay for them to live as grandly as they do.
Bad Bashir day
It’s a triple whammy of bad media coverage for Martin Bashir this weekend. The Mirror has a story that Diana made a desperate phone call to one of her confidants, astrologer Debbie Frank, saying she was having last-minute doubts about going public on the state of her marriage. Frank slams Bashir for manipulating her.
The Sun reports that Alan Waller, an employee of Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, is thinking of going to the police and making a formal complaint about Bashir. The fake bank statements Bashir had made suggested Waller was taking payments for providing information about the princess, and, as the ex-paratrooper says, “I am the one person in all this who can go to the police.”
Worst of all though is the harrowing testimony of producer Eileen Fairweather in the Sunday Telegraph who tells the disturbing story of how she worked on a documentary with Bashir about a notorious double murder of two children in 1986. She alleges Bashir was given a bag of bloodstained clothing by the children’s mother, Michelle Johnson-Hadaway, on which he promised to have DNA sampling run.
However, the documentary was abandoned and the clothes, obviously important evidence, were never returned to the mother. Despite the fact that the mother was able to produce a receipt, signed by Bashir, Bashir subsequently claimed never to have met the mother, and to have no recollection of being given the clothes. Fairweather asks: “How many mothers of murdered children has he interviewed, that he could forget heartbroken but indomitable Michelle?”
No comment from Bashir is featured in any of the articles. However, he has declined to co-operate with BBC investigations into the interview on health grounds, with the BBC saying heart surgery and infection with coronavirus has made him “seriously unwell”
Kate Middleton on parenting
Kate Middleton showed her easy facility for relating to put-upon parents this week, when she joked that she would “like to ask the experts” for advice on handling her children’s temper tantrums while on a video call Q+A.
Asked how she managed temper tantrums, “in your household,” Kate replied, with a laugh, “Yes, that’s a hard one. I’d also like to ask the experts myself.”
Kate has made early childhood, which she defined as including pregnancy and going up to the age of five when British kids start school, one of her key areas of focus, and works with numerous charities that seek to help kids raised in challenging circumstances.
Asked why she had decided to focus on the area, the Daily Mail reports that Kate replied: “I think that people assume that because I am a parent, that’s why I have taken an interest in the early years. I think this really is bigger than that. This isn’t just about happy, healthy children. This is about the society we could and can become.”
Kate added: “Right from the early days, meeting lots of people who are suffering with addiction or poor mental health, and hearing time and time again that their troubles now in adulthood stem right back from early childhood experience.”
Hello! reports the all-important detail that the blue Reiss dress Kate wore is the same outfit she wore to give her first-ever solo royal speech back in 2012.
This week in royal history
A year ago today, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the queen was “beyond reproach,” as he sought to draw a distinction between her and the rest of the royal family, after the furore that erupted following Prince Andrew’s interview with the BBC, in which he appeared so cavalier about his relationship with disgraced dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
“The monarchy is the queen and in my view she is beyond reproach—there is a distinction between the monarchy and the royal family and everybody will readily appreciate that,” Johnson told reporters.
Andrew still hasn’t co-operated with US authorities, and is also not a working senior royal either—although maybe was slightly cheered by season four of The Crown, which showed him to be the apple of the queen’s eye. Mind you, he also seemed pretty insufferable even when he was young.
Unanswered questions
The casting director of a new film about Princess Diana, filming in Germany, has specified that child actors holding only British passports need not apply “due to the new Brexit rules” which kick in on January 1st. This means that a non-British child could well be playing opposite Kristen Stewart as Diana in the film, set in the early 1990s at Sandringham as her marriage collapses. How will the truth-seeking The Crown-bashers respond to that?
