Crown

We have just finished our first viewing of the first season of 'The Crown', a costume drama brought to us on DVD by Netflix and made by Left Bank Pictures, now owned by Sony Pictures Television. Ten episodes of around an hour each, covering the period from our Queen's marriage up to the end of Princess Margaret's romance with fighter ace & equerry Townsend.

The opening sequences, arty close ups of crowns, were subcontracted out to the same people who made the visually similar opening sequences for 'Game of Thrones'.

A well made drama, bringing out some of the issues, both private and public, with the period in question having been neatly cut into episodic chunks, although it suffers, as all fact based dramas do, from a confusion between fact and fiction, with this viewer being uncomfortably aware that he could not tell the difference.

Leaving aside the dollops of bad language and the heavy smoking of many of the characters, I was a little taken aback by the warts and all presentation - with at least some of the real people involved still being alive. And, perhaps with an eye to the US market, with most of the big Brits being made out to be terrible twats or worse. Not very nice people at all - or even very effective. Not like proper sensible, business-like people from the US at all.

Writing as a life-long but weakening republican (having been horrified by the thought of having someone like Blair as Queen and having become more sensitive to the value of having the Prime Minister having to make a weekly report to a nominal superior (whom he can't get rid of) with limited knowledge or experience of the matters in question), I don't really approve of warts and all. The monarchy survives as a myth which we in the population sign up to, but it is best for us not to go poking around behind the scenes. At least not too much. Our place is in the stalls, not in the coulisses; we can leave that to the likes of Townsend.

From where I associate to what seems to be our need for myths more generally. Not to say euphemisms and fakes. I remember my mother being very upset to find, when she moved into her new house in the mid 1950's, to find that the pipework of the kitchen had been surface mounted, in view. She had assumed that it would all be hidden away - where it would both be hard to see and hard to mend, although I don't suppose she was particularly alert to this last. And now we have modern kitchens where everything is tastefully finished and with all the inner workings carefully tucked out of sight. Notwithstanding the current fashion in Southwark eateries for all the ventilation ducts and other ceiling fittings to be on view.

From where I move onto the malleability, onto the evolution of myths. The current myth of the Royal Family being very different from that, say, of 200 years ago. Still more from that of a 1,000 years ago. So, to my mind, the royal flunkeys were laying on the need to preserve form and tradition a bit strong. In which connection, see Strong on coronations.

PS: in passing, I got to know that coulisse has the same root as our portcullis.

Reference 1: Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century - Roy Strong - 2006. Can't imagine that I would have bought such a book from new and Wetherspoon's library seems a bit improbable, so my copy probably came from a charity shop somewhere.