I’m a fan of The Crown. It offers slower pace, better scripts, acting and filming than many recent BBC offerings. It provides an accurately uncanny sense of an archaic culture living in a time-warp that has still significantly inflected our recent past.
At its best, for example the handling of Prince Phillip’s relationship to religion, it has achieved subtlety and seriousness about living issues usually ignored.
The liberties taken with facts and the usually fine fictional dramatisation of known tensions are justifiable where they do not seriously distort the truth, even if this line has too often been crossed.
All these virtues remained in evidence in the first episode of the fourth series, especially in the brilliant handling of Charles’s first encounter with a Puckish Diana. But this apparent subtlety of presentation eventually led to a crudity as to both style and content.
I refer to the treatment of the death of Lord Mountbatten. The build-up to the explosion which killed him was inter-spliced with well-shot but heavy-handed scenes of royals hunting, shooting and fishing, including Mountbatten himself, on his last voyage. And then the scenes of his funeral were intercut with scenes of Bloody Sunday and voice-overs of IRA spokesmen celebrating revenge.
In either case, a certain levelling and equivalence of ‘British’ with ‘Irish’ violence was implied, in a fashion that is insulting to both countries.
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