Adam Boulton Diary – Diana in The Crown makes for a gripping Netflix drama
This week I was lucky to enjoy a sneak preview of the new series of The Crown, as a guest at several removes of Netflix. Season 4 arrives at a sensitive time. The drama is catching up with the late 1980s, Diana Spencer and Margaret Thatcher, in the very month that sees the silver anniversary of that interview between the Princess of Wales and Martin Bashir.
Intriguingly, all the main terrestrial channels – ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 – have marked the occasion with documentaries, except for the BBC, which actually screened it.
This season of The Crown keeps up the sumptuous production values viewers have come to expect with a budget untroubled by recreating Her Majesty (now played by Olivia Coleman) riding out of Buckingham Palace with the Life Guards or deer stalking at Balmoral. As the story moves closer to our time the verisimilitude is a reminder of the extraordinary privilege and luxury which the British royal family still enjoys.
Peter Morgan, the creator of the series, is an experienced master at setting up conflicting protagonists. Frost/Nixon is perhaps the most obvious example. The Deal explored the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, while The Special Relationship depicted Bill Clinton’s “hug ‘em tight” embrace of Prime Minister Blair. Morgan also juxtaposed Blair’s New Labour against the monarch, in Stephen Frear’s movie The Queen.
The new series of The Crown could be seen as a prequel to that film. Morgan repeats the motif of the killing of a magnificent stag as a reflection of the lost glories of human beings. Mrs Thatcher (played by Gillian Anderson) is the counterbalance to Highland romanticism. In Episode 2, “The Balmoral Test”, she is bewildered as much by the rowdy parlour games played by the royals as she is by the blood sports. Dennis and Margaret have a chilling exchange about the snobbishness and philistinism of their hosts while shivering in the bleachers of the Braemar Highland Games. In turn, the Queen is shocked that Thatcher is the first Prime Minister to leave early from their Balmoral weekend. She returns to Westminster to cull her cabinet of the so-called “wets”, pointedly telling the Queen at her next audience that they had to go because of their well-padded backgrounds.
Next into Aberdeenshire in Morgan’s tale is the teenage Diana, invited with little enthusiasm on the part of Prince Charles to be vetted as his future mate. The 24-year-old actress Emma Corin turns in a career-making performance as Diana, revealing both a vulnerability and the steely yearning for the spotlight as the future princess. Where Mrs Thatcher failed to pack outdoor shoes for Balmoral, they are the only footwear in Diana’s luggage. She passes the Balmoral Test with flying colours and Charles is pretty much ordered to make her his wife, by everyone including his mistress Camilla Parker Bowles, played by Emerald Fennell.
It is all gripping and persuasive stuff, conjured by a powerful dramatist. It is easy to forget that it is fiction, but about real people, most of whom are still alive. Morgan has done his research, but we can’t know what, if anything, his main protagonists say to each other in private. We also know that he has shifted some chronology for dramatic effect.
For the show’s creators, or for us as viewers, these are all legitimate techniques. But they carry a heavy responsibility. The Crown’s interpretation of events is likely to be what is remembered and even put on the record for most people, even though they are imagined. Over in California those other Netflix employees, Harry and Meghan, are likely to find much to nurture their grievances in the TV depiction of Harry’s family before Harry was born. The divorce of his parents and death of his mother are both presumably still to come in later episodes.
We do at least know what Diana was really thinking in her final years, because she put it on the record. This was first in the tapes she secretly recorded for Andrew Morton’s book and then in the interview recorded on 5th November 1995, and broadcast to twenty million viewers in the UK two weeks later.
Morton’s book and Bashir’s interview were the journalistic coups of the decade. But the anniversary has been marked by attacks on Bashir. He is now the BBC’s religious affairs editor, after a faltering career in the US, where the highlight was a conniving expose of Michael Jackson.
In the gleeful dog-eat-dog way of British journalism, Bashir stands accused of securing the interview through false pretences. It is alleged that he was party to the manufacture of fake bank statements, shown to Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother, to back up claims that he had a paid spy on his staff. To make matters worse the BBC claimed that it had a letter from Diana stating that the forgeries had nothing to do with the interview, but the corporation were unable to produce it when challenged.
None of this reflects with credit on Bashir or the BBC. Lies and forgeries are not something that I, or most reporters that I know, would be party to. I find it hard to believe that the late Steve Hewlett, then editor of Panorama, or Tony Hall, then head of BBC News, would have been party to such dishonesty either.
Be all that as it may, it seems to me to be a side show to the importance of Bashir’s interview with Diana on the BBC, however it was procured. In a country with a hereditary monarchy like the UK, it is in the legitimate interest of the public to know what is going on between the heir to the throne and their consort. Bashir exposed that in Diana’s own words.
Admittedly it was not a pretty picture and it was a staging point in the tragic spiral which ended with Diana’s violent death in a car crash less than two years after she sat down in Kensington Palace to answer Bashir’s questions. But the reporter should not be blamed for that.
The public will lap up Season 4 of The Crown. It will deserve the BAFTAs, Emmys and Golden Globes it will win in due course. We still owe the true on-the-record revelations though to Martin Bashir.