Victory for The Crown
After a dominant display by The Crown at this week's 73rd Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, here's a look back at two pieces on the show.
There is no ambivalence in my attitude toward The Crown. When it comes to the monarchy, I am an abolitionist, and when it comes to the prurient speculative voyeurism of Lifetime-style daytime biopics, I am cold as ice. But, for The Crown, I am there, for it is a real drama, a show that uses the history of the British royal family under Elizabeth II to explore issues around class and democracy and civil society in a way few shows have ever attempted. Some people don’t like that it does that, because they are either too dumb to understand what drama is, or too servile to the institutions of the British establishment to see that it deserves critique. As the success of the show has grown, so has the feverishness of the takedowns.
For years I ignored The Crown. Entirely for the two reasons I gave in the previous paragraph. But when I began watching it during season three (I backtracked soon after) I realised what it was trying, so artfully and seriously, to do. Other people, in particular those handing out Emmy’s, certainly see it too. Not just entertaining, interesting, littered with excellent performances and perfect scripts, it gets to the hearts of matters. A perfect example is the way it used the disaster at Aberfan in 1966 as a way to explore issues around class, capitalism, and the structures of British industrialism, at the same time of exploring the breakdown in the House of Windsor’s understanding of it’s own subjects. So, here’s a couple of short pieces I’ve written on The Crown in the last few years, both of which were published as reviews in Wales Arts Review. If you haven’t watched it, maybe these will encourage you.
The Crown, Season 3, Episode 3, “Aberfan”
The first thing that The Crown gets right in its episode about the Aberfan disaster is the otherworldliness of the world of mining. Some have a tendency to look back on the industry with rose-tinted glasses. Indeed there is much to be nostalgic about; meaningful employment, belief in education, a working community. But the pre-credit sequence of the third episode of the third season of Netflix’s surprise megahit series about the royal family during the time of Elizabeth II, takes the viewer to a place that keenly bisects the common understanding of just what it was like to live in those communities. The town of Aberfan was not attached to the mine, it was not fulfilled by the mine, it was utterly dominated by it. The smell, the sound, the light, was all in thrall to the workings of that pit. The makers of The Crown, and in particular director Benjamin Caron, understand the reality of life in a town like Aberfan; every window looking out onto, every street pointing up to the works and its filthy produce. As the inspectors ride their jeep up to the peek of tip seven they push through a landscape reminiscent of Krakatoa, and what they see at the summit is bordering on the dystopic. Great wires move unmanned buckets through a misted sky, the air is filled with the intermittent echoing thuds of machinery. This is mining in the way that Zola wrote about it in Germinal, and when the sink hole expands in the floor of tip seven, one cannot help but be reminded of his description of the mines in northern France of the late nineteenth century, a beast with gaping mouth swallowing men all day long into the fires of the Earth. Zola, like The Crown, was concerned both with the human tragedy of the industry, but also with the political tragedy of it, that the lives of working class people have always been expendable when it comes to the feeding of the capitalist monster.
And this is why The Crown has got its depiction of the Aberfan disaster so right. It is artful as much as it is gut-wrenching, and although it is respectful, it is neither nostalgic nor is it afraid to stretch history in order to make a wider point. It is literate, bold, and believes first and foremost in its message, a message that goes far beyond those poor people of Aberfan, but a message for which they are a symbol. The fifty five minutes of drama that make up this Aberfan episode is quite simply the best thing that has been done on the subject.
It is likely some of the success of the episode evolves from the fact that it comes from a place of distance. The subject is still treated in Wales with understandable tenderness, and it is perhaps still too raw to get into it with the dramatist’s scalpel. (Although Neil Docking’s stage play The Revlon Girl is an excellent exploration of grief in the aftermath – and it’s interesting to see both Michelle McTernan and Charlotte Gray from that cast taking roles as mothers here). The Crown is not about Aberfan, and so it comes with the respectful gaze of people with a job to do. The Crown finds in the disaster perhaps its most potent symbol yet of the series’ true preoccupation: the British class system. The Aberfan disaster, then, is not a “Welsh” disaster (although the programme makers treat the country and its people with the utmost respect in this and later episodes), but it is a “working class” disaster, and it is impossible to watch without Grenfell coming to mind. The programme is most interested in the outdated attitudes of the establishment classes of the day, both monarchic and political; how ill-prepared they were in reacting to the very real plights of its subjects. And so there Aberfan also stands for every other exploited community in Britain. The episode is extremely critical of the Queen, there are no two ways about it, but it is sympathetic to a monarchy that had not moved with the times, and not understood the age of deferential subjects had been disintegrating since the Great War.
Director Caron makes some brave choices, and they all come off. When Harold Wilson visits the town, the treatment of the moment when those digging for survivors stop to listen for the cries of the buried is framed in hyper-real theatrical lighting, the searchers cast in amber silhouette, like a monument to the heroes. When Wilson takes questions at a press conference, the anger and desperation of the community comes out of the darkness as disembodied voices, the expressions for the dead of Aberfan, but also for all the people of history and the history yet-to-be-written that have died and will do at the hands of capitalist exploitation.
The performances are exemplary. Olivia Coleman’s Queen disassembles before our eyes; Jason Wilkins’ Wilson portrays a sharp political thinker, but also a man of inescapable compassion; Tobias Menzies as the Duke of Edinburgh shows all the complexities that give so many of the episodes of this season their depth. But the real star is Caron and writer/show creator Peter Morgan, who has managed in just under an hour to create something that is a fitting tribute to the tragedy, but also is a smart and cutting dissection of the political environment that made it happen. Morgan sees in history the repetition of evil and the prejudices that insulate it. That’s why we have Aberfan and Grenfell and countless examples across the world in between those two tragedies.
The Crown, Season 4.
The Crown is back. The historical soap opera to end all historical soap operas that are simultaneously more serious and more fun than all fictionalised takes on the intrigues of the British Royal Family that have gone before. The machination of a family of extreme wealth and power is an ever-alluring subject, and in America, two British writers have nailed the republican version of this in Succession. Perhaps it takes “subjects” of a monarchical state to really get into the bones of this sort of thing. I’ve written before about The Crown, specifically the extremely effective episodes in season three that brought the drama to (and of) Wales, in the context of the Aberfan disaster and Prince Charles’s Investiture in Caernarfon in 1969. Something about Peter Morgan and Benjamin Caron’s distance from the Welsh experience (whatever that might mean) meant they were able to tap into something Welsh writing is perhaps often too close to see.
This new season brings its own set of challenges, and they are very different from the ones facing the creators in previous seasons. Distance from the subject again is what we’re talking about. And as The Crown enters the 1980s it comes into the era of the microscopic focus on Royals as glamorous celebrities. And this was not the same as gossip columnists following Princess Margaret around parties; this was the birth of the fierce tabloid obsession with the younger Royals. The challenge for the creators of The Crown is that we all know these stories or at least many people feel they know them; there are fewer shadows for the writers to get into. The eighties presented the Royals in glorious tabloid technicolour.
In series four, The Crown takes as its focus two women who dominated the decade, Diana Spencer and Margaret Thatcher, and uses them to throw contrast onto the woman who dominated the second half of the century, the Queen. It’s a clever technique, as both Thatcher and Diana bring out very different elements of this interpretation of Elizabeth II, but also points to the past (Thatcher is very much a product of the misogyny prevalent in her upbringing) and the future (Diana will be destroyed by the misogyny of British tabloid journalism and the country it represents). The Queen stands firm through all this, for better or for worse, an imperious survivor no matter what Hogarthian degeneracy goes on in her immediate vicinity, and what social turmoil goes on beyond the walls of her palaces. “Do nothing” is her mantra, and several of her offspring get the chance to throw this back at her in this season. It reminds us of her hesitancy over Aberfan, and it foreshadows her stasis in the aftermath of Diana’s death.
And there is a lot of foreshadowing. The episode where Thatcher’s horror show of a family inspires the Queen to re-evaluate her relationships with her own four children throws up so many red flags around Prince Andrew it borders on the clumsy. But that, to an extent, also speaks of the role of this show now. Peter Morgan is almost obliged to address Andrew’s extremely dodgy interactions with convicted paedophile and sex trafficker-to-the-stars Jeffrey Epstein, even though it isn’t going happen for a few decades yet. Fans of the show would be unhappy if the topic was ignored. The brief scene where Andrew lunches with his mother and displays a dubious moral compass when it comes to the notion of groups of powerful older men having sex with teenage girls is a show-freezing origin story for a man who now, in his fifties, has so many questions still to answer.
The Crown, as ever, takes no prisoners, stands on no-one’s side. With Andrew, the suspicion many people hold is that the palace has protected him from the most damaging attention not because he has nothing to hide, but rather because of the opposite. The Crown suggests a compelling case as to why that might be, and it couldn’t be more damning. And all this in one strand of one episode that probably takes up no more than ten minutes of screen time all combined. The Crown remains a show of admirable intellectual scope. And yes, still a soap opera.
The first episode tackles the assassination of Lord Mountbatten by the IRA. Newsreels and voiceover dramatising the IRA statement claiming responsibility for the murder are pointed reminders of peace hard-won, a peace the spivs currently residing in (and those very recently departed from) Downing Street seem intent on upending with their Brexit. You cannot watch this episode and not wonder what the Queen, the real Queen, feels about all this, all those bodies, all those dead, including her beloved first cousin Mountbatten, forgotten for the sake of some bunting and Rees-Mogg share options. Joe Biden, in contrast, promises not to be a do-nothing President, and his Irish roots, distant as they may be, have not let him forget what the Good Friday Agreement has achieved.
But this is already clear to everyone who hasn’t already sold their credibility down the river on HMS Brexit. New perspectives elsewhere in The Crown are harder to forge. Bringing Diana Spencer into the fold was perhaps going to be more of a challenge than a Balmoral Test. Anyone who cares thinks they already know her. And as for screen depictions, she’s been given the daytime movie treatment more times than is fair. Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep have brought Oscars home for their goes at Elizabeth II and Thatcher. The best Diana has had so far is a career-worst performance from Naomi Watts. Emma Corrin, in at the deep end, is the best on-screen Diana there has been, and may even be guilty of being a more interesting Diana than the actual real-life one. Her puckish introduction may be a little on the nose, enchanting an increasingly self-involved Charles with her elven girly charms, but it’s a good joke to have the Princess who has been suffocated to distortion in popular myth come out of the shadows of the Midsummer Night’s Dream woodland. Writer Morgan and Director Caron play with the ideas of nature and the city in similar ways to Shakespeare in that play. They don’t choose it by accident.
Contrasts are where the real interest lies in season four. Parents to surrogates, love to duty, city to countryside, nature to nurture. The Crown stirs depths with these themes that few television dramas can manage. However, it’s not, and never has been, flawless. Gillian Anderson’s casting as Thatcher evoked an excited sharp intake of breath in many households when it was announced, but she delivers a strange, coiled version of the Iron Lady who seems to have none of the playful arrogance, none of that smugness that is so apparent in television interviews with Thatcher in those early years. Anderson’s Thatcher also delivers many of her lines as if she’s suffering from some kind of respiratory illness. One of the great successes of The Crown is the passing resemblance of the actors to their historical counterparts, enough to convince but not to distract. Andersson has gone full pantomime. Never go full pantomime.
So much of the The Crown Season Four depends on casting light into the shadows, giving life to the world behind the curtains. In the eighties there was less curtain to pull back – tabloid hacks and the telephoto lens made sure of that. But as with the attention on the Welsh tragedy of Aberfan, which saw articles about it appear in media around the world, so perhaps now it’s time for Netflix to remind the world of the squandered lives in the “troubles” in Ireland, the squandered lives of the Falklands, the squandered life of Diana Spencer.
Gary Raymond’s latest novel, The Angels of Cairo, is available now.