Thoughts on things...

1. The Crown

I do get why people still love it. I adore immersive television. And I absolutely see the fascination of watching a soap opera that costs lush millions per episode: Coronation Street with actual coronations.

But quite early on I became unable to immerse myself…. It was around the time that Jackie Kennedy went all Dynasty-bitchfest on the Queen, and was overheard to remark that she is ‘a middle-aged woman so incurious, unintelligent and unremarkable that Britain’s new reduced place in the world was not a surprise but an inevitability’. Who actually talks like that? There may be an element of truth in Mrs K’s antipathy to HM (if one trusts the rabidly gossipy sources of Cecil Beaton and Gore Vidal). but it was made to sound so highly improbable that I mark it as the moment when The Crown abandoned subtlety and picked up a sledgehammer.

The actors were amazing - most of my favourites (headed by the goddess Manville) appeared at some point… but my goodness. As the seasons progressed, some of what they were required to do reminded me of Basil Fawlty’s line to Sybil when he suggests she go on Mastermind: ‘special subject, the bleeding obvious.’

And I can’t cope with downright invention; especially not when people are very recently dead or very much alive. Yet there now seems to be a general acceptance that it’s perfectly OK to make stuff up - not dialogue, not motivations, but actual events. That it is, indeed, irredeemably old-style to care about facts. I can’t accept it. Perhaps because I’m secretly uneducated (ballet school) I have a reverence for facts, provable facts, which tied me in all sorts of knots when trying to write about Agatha Christie’s disappearance or what really happened in the Lucan case… if something wasn’t corroborated or evidence-based then I had to say so. I now realize I should just have said MYSTERY SOLVED BY ME, sold the serial rights for multiple thousands and fronted it out when fact-checkers nibbled away at my adamantine self-assurance.