Did Diana tell the Queen about her Panorama interview? Does Prince Charles breakdance? Fact-checking the Netflix drama, episode by episode
“Fiction should not be paraded as fact.” “Complete and utter rubbish.” “Full of nonsense, but this is nonsense on stilts.” “An inaccurate and hurtful account of history.”
Usually, when a high-profile new television series is launched, its makers fall over themselves to get laudatory quotes to promote it with. However, in the case of the new series of the royal drama The Crown – its fifth – there has been a chorus of criticism from those portrayed in the show itself.
Previous series took advantage of the fact that most of the major characters depicted in it were either unlikely to make any public statements – the Royal Family sticking to its old motto of “never complain, never explain” – or were no longer alive. However, as the new instalment moves into the Nineties, most of the people who appear are very much here, and often deeply unhappy about how they are presented.
The Crown’s screenwriter Peter Morgan – who has written all of the episodes for the new season himself – has always been upfront about the necessity of creating fictitious scenarios for the characters. In 2018, he stated that “we have to make some sort of leaps of the imagination, about how people were”, and conceded “maybe sometimes I get it wrong, because they aren’t friends of mine.”