As we head into the new year, we look back at some of some of Entertainment Now’s best bits.
Here we go again. Another royal outing with Peter Morgan and Princess Diana, this time a four-hour death knell leading up to the tragic car crash in Paris.
Season six opens with a random Frenchman taking his dog out for a late-night walk. He happens to be standing near the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, where he sees a black car zooming away from a horde of biker paparazzi. Screech, crash. The man dials 999. Sirens wail. Like every other film and TV show about the Princess of Wales, the first half of The Crown season six (the next half is out December 14), focuses almost entirely on Diana’s death—the leadup and aftermath. How many more times do we need to see the queen and Prince Charles and the boys hear the news of the Princess’s death in Paris?
Peter Morgan already wrote an Oscar-winning film about the same thing, and that one was much better. I am baffled by The Crown’s continued obsession with playing out every torturous Diana moment, from the last phone call she ever had with her boys to her scandalous poses in a swimming costume on Mohamed Al-Fayed’s yacht. The same was true of the last season— obsessed. Diana on deck in a neon one-piece; Diana kissing Dodi Al-Fayed; Diana eating ice cream with Dodi Al-Fayed; Diana plotting to steal the limelight from Camilla; Peter Morgan has taken every juicy story from Diana’s final years and turned it into a soap opera. Again.
I suspect the reason Peter Morgan can’t get enough of Diana these days is because of Elizabeth Debicki—her portrayal of the princess has more charm than the rest of the cast put together. Her likeness is uncanny. She has perfected the chin-tilt, the sad-eyed, playful gaze. Her posture, her gestures, her voice—everything is spot-on.
The men she spends the most time with are also compelling—Dodi and his conniving father Mohamed Al-Fayed. The mega-wealthy family are very kind to her and deeply manipulative at the same time. ‘Stay all summer on my yacht in St Tropez’, Mohamed says. ‘Oh, and in exchange you will marry my son’. Who knows the real story of how far al-Fayed pushed his son Dodi to marry Diana, but surely he was more subtle than The Crown makes out.
There are relentless scenes of Dodi taking tense phone calls from his father while in earshot of his lover, discussing engagement rings, bedroom arrangements. Awful stuff. It makes one wonder why she sticks around so long. But really, she is trapped. The al-Fayed family have the money and power to protect her like the royal family did—and a woman of her intolerable global fame needs protection.
In this season it’s clearer than ever how miserable it is to be ‘in, then out,’ of the royal family. Her sons are still ‘in’, and Diana is only allotted a certain amount of time with them. If she misses their scheduled phone call, that’s it. She’ll have to wait for the next time slot. It’s the agony of divorce with the added obstacles of royal security and protocol. Like in any divorce, circumstances pit one parent against the other, but in this case, Prince Charles has the backing of the entire royal PR machine. If Diana is torn to shreds by the media, it can only benefit Charles, who spends his time polishing the image of his new lover. Not that Charles and Camilla would purposely sabotage Diana, but their PR team would.
This is the agonising truth that William and Harry sense as boys, and understand as grown men. Their mother was a problem for the family, the ‘Firm’, in which they still reside. Harry’s recent ill-advised escape from the royal family is a direct result of the events surrounding his mother’s death. This is not my idea of entertainment. It is unbearably sad. I found the final episode of part I too much to handle.
Who wants to see Mohamed al-Fayed uncover his dead son’s cold face in the morgue? Or Harry and Willian’s expressions when they hear that their mother is dead? Who wants this? These people are real, and many are still alive. Their feuds and foibles are played out in the tabloids every day. Watching all this dramatised on Netflix feels terrible. I feel much worse about it than I do scanning the odd Harry and Meghan article in the Mirror. It feels much more invasive, even though it’s fictionalised.
The Crown in its sixth season bears no resemblance to the first, which starred the brilliant Claire Foy and Matt Smith. Rather than giving us a glimpse of the extraordinary lives of our late monarch and her family, it now lingers on all of their most pathetic, unlikeable traits—the Prince of Wales’s simpering pleas to his mother to accept his new girlfriend, and her cold indifference to them. The Prince of Wales is now our monarch. His mother Queen Elizabeth is dead. I may sound unfashionably royalist by saying so, but this series feels deeply inappropriate and disrespectful now. And worse, it’s no longer fun.