The Crown: latest season is dangerous because the young may take it as historical gospel

The first three series of The Crown were so gripping that, as the Queen might say, my husband and I would devour at least three or four episodes in one sitting, often crawling to bed in the early hours of the morning; it’s an appalling habit that has earned us the title of “teenagers” from our grown-up children.

Alas, we were not to live up to that reputation last night. At the end of the first episode of Netflix’s eagerly awaited Season four, we looked at each other, shook our heads, switched the off button and hit the covers. Sadly, this first episode was disappointing in so many ways: the dialogue was simplistic and the relationships between the main players were contrived while some of the protagonists came across as parodies of themselves.

Tweeting earlier today, Lord Forsyth, former MP and Thatcherite cabinet minister, was spot on when he criticised the script for being ludicrous and appalling, one step up from Spitting Image.

What a missed opportunity. The period being covered from 1977 to 1990 was one of such high drama and spectacle that you would think it was hard to mess up not having a script to suit.

What we saw in the first show was the brutal murder of Lord “Dickie” Mountbatten (played brilliantly by Charles Dance), his grandson and three others in the boat off the coast of Sligo by the IRA, a devastating event that triggered another two decades of horrendous violence, which were thankfully brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement.

Yet the real story here was not about the UK’s relations with the IRA terrorists – apart from some mawkish film of protests – but Dickie’s relationship with Prince Charles, and his father, Prince Philip. The scene between Charles and Philip, when father told son he had been chosen to give the funeral eulogy, was painful to watch. We know that they have had a tempestuous relationship but are we to believe that this was because Charles had supplanted Philip in Dickie’s heart? That’s a stretch and I’m not sure its historically accurate or even plausible.

What was apparently true and rendered faithfully in the show was the first meeting between Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, whom he first saw prancing around the Spencer pile dressed as a tree aged 16 for a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This was sweet, and all the better for being close to what actually happened.

And so, to 1979 and the rise of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister, and her first meetings with the Queen. Gillian Anderson, who plays Thatcher, is one of the finest actresses of her generation. She manages to capture the best and worst of Thatcher’s most mesmerising idiosyncrasies, but I fear she carried them out rather too well: and ended up even looking like her Spitting Image puppet when telling the Queen she would fight with all her might against the IRA after learning of Mountbatten’s death. Again, are we to believe this is how Thatcher would have spoken to the Queen?

If only we knew. And that was the problem with this episode: you did not get any sense the story unfolding was in any way true to life because it lacked nuance and subtlety. This is dangerous because so many youngsters who will be watching the series will take the drama as historical gospel.

This gap between fact and fiction did not seem to matter so much with the earlier seasons of The Crown – partly because most of us oldies knew more about the reality of those events so we could suspend belief over what was clearly a porkie or two. But this is close up and in real-time, and in my generation’s memory. We can make the distinctions but the younger generation without the historical knowledge may not make the same separation.

Please tell me the next episodes are better because being a stay-up-a night teenager is so much more fun than hitting the sack early.