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The Crown isn't making the royal family look bad. They do a fine job of that themselves
The Crown isn’t making the royal family look bad. They do a fine job of that themselves
Catherine Bennett
Whatever the guild of royal experts says, Peter Morgan’s series can’t match the truth of its unlovely subjects
Sun 29 Nov 2020 03.30 EST
(Guardian UK) Which, below, did the Prince of Wales not say?
a) “I am the Prince of Wales and I will be King!”
b) “I need encouragement and the occasional pat on the back too.”
c) “Darling, come back, of course I want to hug you.”
Any accredited royal writer would know instantly that the answer is b), a line from season 4 of Peter Morgan’s The Crown. The first quote was aimed by a tantruming Charles, along with a book, at Paul Burrell. “I can still see its fluttering pages whirring through the air,” Burrell wrote in A Royal Duty. Quote c) is from The Housekeeper’s Diary by Wendy Berry, a book banned in the UK. “In 1986,” she wrote, “Diana was still making an effort to be loving and affectionate to her husband.”
....(snip)....
Fellow Charlesite Penny Junor thinks the dramatisation is over-indebted to Diana. “How easy it is to be seduced,” she writes, “into thinking what we see on screen is what really happened and this is what members of the royal family really said to one another.” Though, equally, how easy it is, when such royal authorities assemble, to forget that some of the deadliest lines – Charles’s “whatever ‘in love’ means” – are verbatim.
....(snip)....
Since this is the second time in a month (following the Martin Bashir revelations) that royal commentators have felt compelled to move more or less en bloc against an outsider whose methods they deplore, the creation of some sort of organised guild or union is surely overdue. Royal specialists have for years taken sides, but this was always, you gathered, undertaken regretfully, professionally, out of virtually Baghottian reverence for the institution at risk. No passionate Diana or Charles advocate – or adversary – ever intended by their partiality to expose the entire royal family, as The Crown relentlessly does, as cruel, spoilt and silly, essentially a collection of pitiful victims. .............(more)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/29/the-crown-isnt-making-british-royal-family-look-bad-they-do-that-themselves
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