is the British royal family as awful as Netflix says?

edited November 2020 in Purgatory
Perfectly awful people. Puffed up with themselves. Preoccupied with frivolous things. Mean and cruel. I wonder if worse. It's almost unwatchable. Except as destruction. Charles is particularly obnoxious. Philip before him. Destruction of themselves and others. The queen as empty though more sad.

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  • Gramps49Gramps49 Shipmate
    edited November 2020
    Are you referring to The Crown? I believe it was produced in the United Kingdom.
  • The short answer is no. This is a TV series. It has no contact with any of the people actually depicted and is “based on a true story”. Reality has very little to do with it!
  • I watched 20 min of Season 1, episode 1 and stopped as I just could not go on seeing the coldness, class, priviledge... as a child
    I'd been sent cut-out-from-the-newspaper pictures of '"the little princes" as my Grandmother called A*drew (now disgraced ) and Edward who were about my age. I'd watched clips on Youtube of The Crown and thought fondly of Grandma and Mum telling me of various historical incidents and people. I was so looking forward to it when 3 weeks ago I opened a Netflix account ... and then so disappointed at the seemingly endless nastiness and "luxury". (Like not lighting your own cigarette.) Then, when I watched Grandma's hero Winston Churchill wait 30 seconds at the door of St Paul's so he could enter just as the organ playing "I Vow to Thee My Country" ... I just couldn't stand it any more.
    I was sad all day.

  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host
    I find it barely watchable. There are some (small) areas where I know it is untrue which makes me distrustful. Then there are many areas where they simply can’t know what we said or done, and my lack of trust prevents me from accepting the narrative.

    The Crown’s creator Peter Morgan has defended some of the fabricated scenes in the fourth season of the series for its deviation from known fact. He argues that it dramatically expresses what his researches have led him to really believe to be true. For me, though, while truth may be more than facts, it is never less.

    On top of all that, however right or wrong it may be in terms of truth and accuracy, it seems to me to be a cruelty to living people who have little or no opportunity to defend themselves or the memory of their now dead family members.
  • I don't have a television set so I haven't seen it, but in my view such fabrications should not be attempted in the life-time of the persons depicted, however long their lives may be.
  • BroJames wrote: »

    I find it barely watchable. There are some (small) areas where I know it is untrue which makes me distrustful. Then there are many areas where they simply can’t know what we said or done, and my lack of trust prevents me from accepting the narrative.
    .......

    On top of all that, however right or wrong it may be in terms of truth and accuracy, it seems to me to be a cruelty to living people who have little or no opportunity to defend themselves or the memory of their now dead family members.

    My knowledge of the royal family is minute, but particularly in this last series I find it difficult to believe that Charles went into his marriage with Diana whilst still so deeply enamoured with another woman, also it grates that Diana is being portrayal as someone quite so artless and stupid. (Like her behaviour when she first meets the family, or first goes to a state banquet...)

    I also agree with your last paragraph.
  • I have watched earlier series but not yet this one.

    To be fair, it is fairly well “known” (i.e. believed) that other members of the royal family interfered at to prevent Charles marrying Camilla Parker Bowles (whatever her surname was at the time) and ensure he married someone considered more suitable. The fact he eventually married her after Diana’s death and did so despite the public sentiment, religious and constitutional obstacles - would suggest there really was a deep attachment in the first place.

    Arguably he’d have been a lot happier, and Diana might still be alive, if he’d been allowed to marry the woman he loved in the first place.
  • Worse. IME
  • I agree @Doublethink

    Apparently those working on the show did reach out the palace to see if there was an opportunity for fact-checking, but the answer was a firm ‘no’.

    A decision the royal family may come to regret?
  • LydaLyda Shipmate
    I have watched earlier series but not yet this one.

    To be fair, it is fairly well “known” (i.e. believed) that other members of the royal family interfered at to prevent Charles marrying Camilla Parker Bowles (whatever her surname was at the time) and ensure he married someone considered more suitable. The fact he eventually married her after Diana’s death and did so despite the public sentiment, religious and constitutional obstacles - would suggest there really was a deep attachment in the first place.

    Arguably he’d have been a lot happier, and Diana might still be alive, if he’d been allowed to marry the woman he loved in the first place.

    I have thought this for many years. If they had not been so adamant that he marry a virgin, he might have married the right person. He and Camilla are obviously soul mates, a term I rarely use.
  • KwesiKwesi Shipmate
    IMO The Crown is for the most part brilliant because it gets to the core of the problem: that the institution is centred on the monarch, in which the role of her family is to reflect her glory. Consequently, the various members lead rich but tragically purposeless lives, in which even the heir, having passed his seventieth birthday, has yet to assume the job for which he has been trained. There is also the corrosive influence of The Abdication, which has blighted the lives of Princess Margaret and Prince of Wales, especially. Escape is difficult- it will be instructive to see how the Sussexes cope. While I'm in favour of the system for purely functional purposes, I'm left to wonder whether the cost to those involved is justified.
  • It's massive fun. It blends things we remember with things we suspect.
  • ISTM that The Crown appeared to build up Charles as a victim sympathetically in the first three series, and then twisted the knife sharply in series four to turn him into a monster.

    The programme (in series 3?) on Charles' unhappy experience at Gordonstoun was based on comments Charles himself has made and didn't seem far from the truth.

    Fun fact - the woman who set up Aberdeen's first birth control clinic in 1926 was also one of the governors of Gordonstoun when Philip was there. She was responsible for providing a tutor in Modern Greek for him.
  • Alan29 wrote: »
    It's massive fun. It blends things we remember with things we suspect.

    That's exactly what I was hoping for ... but they were all simply 98% horrid - in themselves and to one another - in The Crown. Which is not something I want to burden myself with as "entertainment"
  • Martin54Martin54 Shipmate
    edited November 2020
    Brilliant, utterly compelling historical drama, interpolating in to the white space as well as any other. I love them all so far, up to and including Charles at Aberystwyth. I certainly don't believe Philip ever broke the letter of the law of adultery after marriage (let alone HM with Porchie), as he said to a in journo '92, "Good God, woman. Have you ever stopped to think that, for the past 40 years, I have never moved anywhere without a policeman accompanying me? So how the hell could I get away with anything like that?". Prior to '52...

    The PMs are perfect. Lithgow as Churchill! Northam, Lesser, Watkins so far.

    As for Edward VIII, as a certain historian told me personally, they would have hung him if they could. You'll know in 2040 I think.
  • That would be more convincing if the Wales' hadn't both very famously managed to pull that off.
  • I met old Edinburgh solo, on a beach, so I take that with a kilo of salt. No woman in sight.
  • TheOrganistTheOrganist Shipmate
    edited November 2020
    Perfectly awful people. Puffed up with themselves. Preoccupied with frivolous things. Mean and cruel. I wonder if worse. It's almost unwatchable. Except as destruction. Charles is particularly obnoxious. Philip before him. Destruction of themselves and others. The queen as empty though more sad.

    In a word, No. Over the years I have come into contact* with a few and they have all, with 2 exceptions, been absolutely charming.

    I have also met two of the people who have "married in": one, despite having a spectacularly obnoxious husband, came across as a perfectly normal, though slightly scatty, sloane; the other not so good - noticeably bored and made it obvious they'd rather be elsewhere.

    Of the two I've met most often: the PoW came across as interested in the event/cause, well-briefed and asked some pertinent and searching questions. Yes, slightly old-fashioned but self-deprecating and with a good sense of humour. The Princess Royal is pretty much as in The Crown: no-nonsense, bright, wouldn't suffer fools gladly.

    * A very good long-standing friend is involved with equestrian sport ...
  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
    It’s a blend of truth and fiction. For example, Fagan’s breaking are portrayed pretty accurately but the conversation with the Queen is imaginary and exists for a dramatic purpose.

    And that example applies generally to private conversations involving members of the Royal Family.

    So the impressions created about the various personalities are conjecture. They may well contain elements of truth of course but they are hardly reliable.
  • Alan29 wrote: »
    It's massive fun. It blends things we remember with things we suspect.

    I don't think The Crown is "fun" at all - I think it a cruel exercise in pillorying people it knows can't answer back, and without any thought of the distress they're probably causing or the damage they're inflicting.
  • What, all of it? Haven't seen how it handles Diana yet. I'm more sympathetic to everyone else involved as well nowadays. Anne can do no wrong. When she was first banqueted as patron of Save The Children, she said from the stage that they would never do that again. Why Margaret didn't abdicate for Townsend or dedicate herself to charity either way is sad.
  • Explanation for Margaret not marrying Townsend can be given in three words : Abdication, Queen Mother.
  • I'm rarely interested in biopics unless we know they're basically accurate, which it seems on a basic reading of facts vs. fiction, this isn't or might not be. I couldn't even watch 'The Tudors' because they played it like Dynasty!

    It's The Firm's policy not to interact with popular portrayals of their lives. If the Palace was approached by the film-makers to confirm details or facts not already in the public domain, the film-makers must be stupendously thick to think an exception to that rule would've been made in their case. It seems they're even unable to coordinate provable facts within the structure of their episodes, having to conflate events and the timing of incidents in unrealistic ways for the sake of 'dramatic license'. Mind you, that has always been the historical relationship between popular perception and royal propaganda anyway. Thomas More and Richard III anyone?

    I'm sure it is hugely enjoyable, however, for those watching it as a kind of British, blingy soap opera with a lot of bitchin' going on. If, in any way, the Royals are even vaguely like any other family on earth, there'll be plenty of that. But with shedloads of privilege, haute couture, weird accents and the bloodless 'morality' of outdated 'values' thrown in. That Charles and Camilla were not permitted to marry by the Palace, back in the day, was just how things were then. Just like Edward couldn't marry Wallis. Or the previous Edward Mrs Keppel.

    As for Diana. She was twenty when she married Charles. She had only met him - was it thirteen times? - before she married him. She was a fool, and old enough to have known better, however hopeful she might have been at that age for a fairtytale romance. If he hadn't managed to convince Diana of his affection for her in that time, because he was still so hung up on 'Gladys', she clearly was up for whatever adventure she thought becoming Princess of Wales would bring her. If you're twenty, marrying a guy twelve years older who is the heir to the throne with a long public record of romances including Mrs Parker Bowles, you'd need to be quite wilfully looking in the other direction, going up the aisle!

    I'm not saying she wasn't fooled, or lied to. Or that she wasn't used by The Firm in quite a heartless way. They were culpable, of course. I do have sympathy for her, too - because of her inexperience and youth. Maybe she was optimistically silly enough to think that a man with Charles's relationship history would magically transform into another kind of person under her influence. Lots of partners think so. But Diana was part of the institution of the privileged higher-ups, knew the game and went along for the ride, in my opinion. Sadly, a gamble that didn't work out. What she was getting into was a well-known, widely acceptable 'situation' for royal marriages. As a young woman of her class and upbringing there wouldn't have been much for her to learn about the rules of what would be expected from her. Arguably, to her credit, she eventually decided she didn't want to play anymore. Though the Bashir interview, to my mind, reduced her standing as victim and sacrificial lamb.

  • LadyleftfieldloverLadyleftfieldlover Shipmate Posts: 16
    Don't forget that after Diana's death it emerged that she had assisted Andrew Morton with his book about her. This is where we learnt all the bullemia stuff and how the RF treated her.
  • Anselmina wrote: »
    As for Diana. She was twenty when she married Charles. She had only met him - was it thirteen times? - before she married him. She was a fool, and old enough to have known better, however hopeful she might have been at that age for a fairtytale romance.

    The late Princess was naive, sheltered, and not very bright. She was also kind and sympathetic. Combine that with the naivety she had, and you get a predisposition to see the best in everyone.

    As for "The Crown", I'm not at all a fan of fictionalized history. It's all part of the game of interweaving truth and lies that gives you a kind of Trumpian disregard for actual fact in preference to things that you think ought to be true. I don't see a reason to consider it any more believable that Braveheart.

    (To their credit, the producers of The Crown have done a reasonable job with the clothes, whereas most producers of "historical" fiction prefer to select clothing based on what they'd like to see rather than what was actually worn in the period they're attempting to portray. Although given the amount of actual video footage of the Royal Family that is available, they probably can't really get this too wrong.)
  • The Crown is as historically accurate as Shakespeare's Henry V or Richard III.


  • Blame the young dead woman. Is that the game? Silly wee girlie? Well, f*** that noise.

    Looked like the royal family wanted someone "acceptable", who they could control and train. Then she grew up and had her own ideas, which they could not tolerate. She was disposable. Keeping with the stilted way Netflix has them talk, they were "beastly" to her. I don't blame her.
  • The Crown is as historically accurate as Shakespeare's Henry V or Richard III.

    This. It is entertainment with an historical source as its inspiration.

  • edited November 2020
    Alan29 wrote: »
    It's massive fun. It blends things we remember with things we suspect.

    I don't think The Crown is "fun" at all - I think it a cruel exercise in pillorying people it knows can't answer back, and without any thought of the distress they're probably causing or the damage they're inflicting.

    I haven't seen it, but I feel a bit like this having read this issue's Private Eye critique of it. PE are not known for their royalist credentials - viz. the long-running 'Heir of Sorrows' spoof and their regular royal gossip column by 'Flunkey' - but the gist of the article seemed to be that so much dramatic liberty had been taken with when things happened and who they happened to, that leaving the names of the characters unchanged from the real people to whom some of this stuff didn't happen, would be risky indeed if the people in question could not be relied upon not to sue. Perhaps it needs one of those 'any resemblance...' disclaimers, anyway.
  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host
    Blame the young dead woman. Is that the game? Silly wee girlie? Well, f*** that noise.

    Looked like the royal family wanted someone "acceptable", who they could control and train. Then she grew up and had her own ideas, which they could not tolerate. She was disposable. Keeping with the stilted way Netflix has them talk, they were "beastly" to her. I don't blame her.
    Certainly that’s one of the popular ways of portraying the situation. I’m no better placed than any other member of the public to assess its validity.
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    Shakespeare had to change the name of one of his characters when his descendants threatened to sue. (Sir John Oldcastle to Sir John Falstaff.)
  • One of the issues is - how do you research the "truth"? I took a look at the newspaper reports of the avalanche which killed Major Lindsay in March 1988.

    All the papers reported that the Queen and Prince Philip had been attending an engagement when they heard the news. None of the reports suggest there had been any delay in establishing which person had died (unlike the version in The Crown in which the Queen and Prince Philip were at home and were told initially that the body of a man had been found, and was yet to be identified). One paper reported that the Queen's engagement lasted the allotted time and she gave it her full attention.

    Unsurprisingly, reports varied according to the viewpoint of the various papers. A "Charles the Hero!" headline was followed by a description of Charles locating and helping to dig out Mrs Palmer-Tompkinson, thus saving her life. A more neutral "Charles Escapes Killer Avalanche" described Charles as "weeping and shaking." Some newspapers reassured their readers that a Swiss judge had said that Charles had diplomatic immunity and couldn't be prosecuted for causing the death of Major Lindsay (an inquest subsequently exonerated him).

    The Daily Mirror did a hatchet job, comparable to the hatchet job The Crown is now doing:
    How does a man whose responsibilities cause him such anguish live with the knowledge that in his pursuit of dangerous, foolhardy excitement, a close friend and loyal servant has died?....His burdens, his unhappiness and his confusion about his role in life have begun to worry us all. Will the tragedy of Klosters heap more guilt on those weary Royal shoulders....At the end of the day the Prince has to distinguish between life as he would like it to be and life as it is....If he could accept what he cannot change, Prince Charles would face the future with a lighter heart and a firmer step

    The Mirror's viewpoint from March 1988 seems to be very close to The Crown's current portrayal.
  • Perfectly awful people. Puffed up with themselves. Preoccupied with frivolous things. Mean and cruel. I wonder if worse. It's almost unwatchable. Except as destruction. Charles is particularly obnoxious. Philip before him. Destruction of themselves and others. The queen as empty though more sad.
    Are you refering to that Fiction called The Crown ?
    Don't forget that after Diana's death it emerged that she had assisted Andrew Morton with his book about her. This is where we learnt all the bullemia stuff and how the RF treated her.

    According to Andrew Morton.
  • He was doing Camilla before, during, and after marrying Diana. Firm something, but not a step. Weary royals shoulders?
  • O a plague on all their houses!

    Away with this outmoded, anachronistic, rubbish called *royalty*, along with the superannuated tourist attraction at its head!

    Let's have a proper President - America has one, so why can't we?
  • O a plague on all their houses!

    Away with this outmoded, anachronistic, rubbish called *royalty*, along with the superannuated tourist attraction at its head!

    Let's have a proper President - America has one, so why can't we?
    They've got one available to give way on 20 January...
  • Don't forget that after Diana's death it emerged that she had assisted Andrew Morton with his book about her. This is where we learnt all the bullemia stuff and how the RF treated her.

    According to Andrew Morton.
    Actually it emerged before Diana's death that she had recorded hours of tapes in respinse to written questions from Morton. The tapes were delivered to Morton by a go-between, James Colthurst, a friend of Diana's from before her marriage.

    When an updated version of Diana: Her True Story was released it included copies of the original proofs corrected in Diana's own handwriting.
    He was doing Camilla before, during, and after marrying Diana. Firm something, but not a step. Weary royals shoulders?

    Actually, after her marriage to APB Charles was giving Camilla a shoulder to cry on: a notorious philanderer APB slept with most of Camilla's friends, the female membership of The Beaufort and the west country polo set. He was the model for a philanderer called Rupert Campbell-Black who features in at least 3 of Jilly Cooper's bonk-busters. What drove Charles and Camilla into the affair in the late 1980s was the continued adultery of both their spouses.
  • Prince Charles was 31, heading for 32, single, and under huge pressure to marry a virgin with no "past." Almost by definition he was going to have to marry someone much younger. Were there any other eligible teenagers he could have chosen who would have fared better than Diana?
  • Charles is suggested to have been bonking Camilla all the way through. Is the suggestion that he didn't keep Camilla as The Crown says?

    "Notorious philanderer" - haven't heard terminology like that for decades.
  • After they started dating, but prior to their engagement, in November 1980, several newspapers ran a story about Lady Diana having been twice smuggled aboard the Royal Train in Wiltshire to join Prince Charles, the suggestion being that they had slept together.
    Buckingham Palace issued a formal denial, stating that Prince Charles had been on the train at those times and place but that Lady Diana had not joined him.

    Much later Private Eye claimed that the story of a blond woman being smuggled on board was true, but that it had been Camilla, not Diana.

    This story seems to be true, which suggests at the very least that Charles was still sleeping with Camilla after he had started a relationship with Diana.
  • KwesiKwesi Shipmate
    .........The cad! The bounder!
  • I was going to say that it is good we establish Charles' stellar character so we can contrast it with his bad behaviour in The Crown...
  • I always heard that the blonde on the royal train was Lady "Kanga" Tryon.
    Prince Charles was 31, heading for 32 <snip>
    Actually 32 going on 33 at the time of the wedding, she had been 20 a few weeks earlier.

  • It's just a soapie with good production values.

    I shot J.R. Ewing.
  • As others have said, it is a soap opera. I should point out that I have not seen an of it, as I don't have Netflix. But I have seen all the stuff around it.

    It draws from known - publicly available - information, and drawing these details out as much as they can.

    I have very mixed feelings about the royals. I think they have a place, but I also think they sometimes - oftentimes - get it wrong.
  • I always heard that the blonde on the royal train was Lady "Kanga" Tryon.
    Prince Charles was 31, heading for 32 <snip>
    Actually 32 going on 33 at the time of the wedding, she had been 20 a few weeks earlier.

    It may well have been "Kanga" Tryon. But either the Palace didn't know, or they were were being disingenuous in issuing the formal denial. Had it been known that Price Charles was having a tryst with another woman after he was romantically linked with Diana, the wheels would have come off the fairytale juggernaut before it got as far as an engagement, or would at least have delayed the engagement long enough for them to have come to their senses.

    I don't know whether it is because Series 4 covers a time I remember well, or whether there has been a change in tone, but The Crown seems to have been sticking the knife in in this series in a way that it hadn't in the previous three seasons.

    Why is Charles portrayed as perpetually stooped? He looks like a cross between Richard III and Mr Bean.

  • As others have said, it is a soap opera. I should point out that I have not seen an of it, as I don't have Netflix. But I have seen all the stuff around it.

    It draws from known - publicly available - information, and drawing these details out as much as they can.

    I have very mixed feelings about the royals. I think they have a place, but I also think they sometimes - oftentimes - get it wrong.

    It should be constitutionally impossible for the Queen to be wrong. Its not her decision. It's the Prime Minister who is wrong. Any private decision she might make is irrelevant. The job of the Monarch is to sit down, shut up, and sign where indicated. The job of the monarch's family is to be invisible.
  • Simon Toad wrote: »
    <snip> The job of the Monarch is to sit down, shut up, and sign where indicated.
    Which is what ER II does.
    The job of the monarch's family is to be invisible.
    Not really. Since WWI it has become the established norm for members of the RF to visit communities, hospitals and charities to highlight good work and give encouragement.
  • {Cross-pond mutterings from an American who hasn't seen the series, so this is probably worth half of what you're paying for it...Half of $0 is an undefined number, so...don't expect too much! ;) )}

    --While I may sometimes envy the royals' homes and land, I don't think I really envy their lives. Their choices are limited, and they live in a fish bowl. So any craziness or difficulty in their lives is for all the world to see--and the world thinks it has a right to see. They're kind of like topiary plants: shaped, trimmed, something other than what they are, and on display.

    --From various documentary shows on PBS, it seems like Charles has had a rough time. IIRC, there was distance between him and his mom growing up, and that made him very unhappy. In the shows, it seemed like a combination of Elizabeth focusing on her royal duties, and Charles feeling like he never got enough of her attention, and never was good enough for her.

    To go through all that, then have no really free choice about whether and who he married...

    --I like and respect Charles for his environmental and organic farming work. He really seems to be in his element, and happier.

    --In the film "The King's Speech", the back story about Elizabeth's father, his nanny (?), and his...grandmother (???) was harrowing.

    --Both Diana and Sarah/Fergie (Andrew's ex) were popular over here with women. I think a lot of it was the long-running meme about girls a) wanting to be princesses and b) never realizing that dream. The twist was that D and S/F got that dream (ok, S/F wasn't technically a princess)--and it went wrong. So, ISTM, there was this tangled angst about dreams, impossibilities, and real life, all played out in front of us. There was sympathy for their situation; and empathy for them going through what they did. I felt that way, and I think many other American women did, too.

  • Point of order - half of 0 is 0, not undefined.
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