Thursday 26 November 2020

Understanding Camilla's Side Of The Story // The Crown's fake history is as corrosive as fake news // ‘The Crown’ Stokes an Uproar Over Fact vs. Entertainment


Why we should stop painting Camilla as a villain

By Brittani Barger  22nd November 2020

https://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/wales/why-we-should-stop-painting-camilla-as-a-villain-152607/

 


For decades, many have painted the Duchess of Cornwall as a villain cast opposite of Diana’s hero. It is past time for that narrative to stop.

 

I was struck by how the Duchess is being, again, painted as the villain while watching the latest series of The Crown. We see her as the other woman, running around with the Prince of Wales while he was married to Diana. It is important to remember that these two loved each other from the beginning, and it was the Royal Family who would not allow them to be together. If they had had it their way, they would have been married to each other from the beginning. Now, I’m not condoning an extramarital affair, but there is more to this story than gets reported.

 

Has she made mistakes? Yes, but I beg you to find someone on the planet who has not made a mistake in their life. You won’t be able to find one.

 

Camilla has been a member of the Royal Family for 15 years now. She has kept her head down and gotten to work, never complaining. The Duchess works with many organisations including the Animal Care Trust, BookTrust, Children’s Hospice South West, Cornwall Air Ambulance Trust, Elephant Family, and the Royal Osteoporosis Society. Overall, she supports over 90 organisations where she is either the patron or president.

 

Since becoming a member of the Royal Family, the Duchess of Cornwall has become one of the most loved members, especially by the press. She is always so friendly and warm to the media who she knows is at engagements to do their jobs. She smiles and helps them get good photographs for their stories, knowing that the causes she’s championing will be focused on, as well.

 

Camilla always has a smile and jokes with those, including the press, around her. She will hop into a new ambulance helicopter named after her and share a laugh with the service personnel there, just like she will put on a virtual reality headset to give it a spin. The Duchess of Cornwall is relatable and is passionate about the causes close to her heart and those close to the hearts of other members of the Royal Family.

 

She’s also the only member of the Royal Family who personally responds to the majority of those who write to her, personally signing letters sent to well-wishers.

 

She has worked tirelessly to gain the Royal Family, press and public’s approval. It has not been an easy road, but after decades, I think it is time that the Duchess of Cornwall gets a break. It’s time that the media and Hollywood stop painting her as the villain. She does so much good for the UK and has been a fantastic ambassador for the Royal Family and the United Kingdom since she married the Prince of Wales.

 

We should also take into consideration that Camilla helped to raise Diana’s boys after Diana’s tragic death in a 1997 car crash. Camilla married the Prince of Wales in 2005 and had been a part of Princes William and Harry’s lives for years. Both William and Harry have now married and have children of their own; for Princes George and Louis, Princess Charlotte and Archie, Camilla is the only paternal grandmother they will ever know (they will undoubtedly know of ‘Granny Diana’ but they can’t know her in person). From interactions we’ve seen of Camilla with the children, we can see the love she has for them and the love they have for her. I’m sure Diana is happy that Camilla is there to show her grandchildren and children love and be there for them since she can’t. Camilla and Diana may not have gotten along, but the most important thing to Diana was her two boys. Nothing would make her happier than to look down to see them having a stable mother figure in their lives who cares about them, and the same can be said about her grandchildren.

 

Now it should be noted that I’m a fan of Diana, and I’ve found her inspirational. As a child, she was THE princess, the one who made me believe that princesses were not just in Disney stories. However, I’m not blinded by her; I know she was not perfect. She made mistakes, and we can’t act as though she was a saint, just as we can’t act as though Camilla is a villain.


The Crown's fake history is as corrosive as fake news

Simon Jenkins

The popular TV series about the royal family is reality hijacked as propaganda, and a cowardly abuse of artistic licence

 


Mon 16 Nov 2020 17.13 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/16/the-crown-fake-history-news-tv-series-royal-family-artistic-licence

 

When you turn on your television tonight, imagine seeing the news acted rather than read. Someone looking like Boris Johnson furiously screaming at his fiancee, Carrie Symonds; Dominic Cummings vomiting into a can; and the Queen told to piss off. Afterwards the BBC flashes up a statement saying all this was “based on true events”, and hoping we enjoyed it.

 

The royal family series The Crown has garnered plaudits for its acting and brickbats for its inaccuracies, almost all of them derogatory towards living or recently dead individuals. The new series, on Netflix, appears to have upped the fabrication and the offence. The scriptwriter, Peter Morgan, admits: “Sometimes you have to forsake accuracy, but you must never forsake truth.”

 

This sounds like a dangerous distinction. Helen Mirren’s portrayal of Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006) was uncomplimentary but a plausible recreation of events around the death of Diana. Olivia Colman’s sour-faced parody of the monarch on Netflix left us guessing which parts were true and which false. It was fake history. The words and actions of living individuals were made up to suit a plot that could have been scripted by Diana’s biggest supporters.

 

The historian Hugo Vickers has already detailed eight complete fabrications in the new series, all caricaturing the royal family in the worst possible light. They are:

 

1. Lord Mountbatten wrote a letter to Prince Charles the day before his death.

 

2. The royal family laid protocol traps to humiliate Margaret Thatcher on a visit to Balmoral.

 

3. Princess Margaret ridiculed Princess Diana for not being able to curtsey.

 

4. Prince Charles called Camilla Parker Bowles every day in the early years of his marriage.

 

5. Princess Diana threw a tantrum on a visit to Australia and forced the plans to be changed.

 

6. Princess Margaret visited two of the Queen’s cousins, who had been placed in a “state lunatic asylum” to avoid embarrassing the monarchy.

 

7. The Queen was responsible for leaking her view of Thatcher as “uncaring”.

 

8. The Queen was repeatedly shown wrongly dressed for Trooping the Colour.

 

These are on a par with the “revelations” in an earlier series, one implicating Prince Philip in the Profumo affair and another hinting at infidelity. The intention was clearly to give a shudder of shock to viewers lulled into assuming it was all true.

 

The royal family can look after themselves, and usually do. I am less sure of history, and especially contemporary history. The validity of “true story” docu-dramas can only lie in their veracity. We have to believe they are true, or why are we wasting our time?

 

False history is reality hijacked as propaganda. As Morgan implies, his film may not be accurate, but his purpose is to share a deeper truth with his audience: that the royal family were beastly to Diana, and out to get her. Will we next be told they really killed her? Will we have another Oliver Stone falsifying the circumstances around the killing of President Kennedy in JFK?

 

We all know Shakespeare took liberties with history. There are still writers who struggle to correct his spin, as Richard III knows to his cost. Most historical novelists go to great lengths to verify their version of events, as Hilary Mantel does. So did Tolstoy, in War and Peace. We accept that distant history has time to set its house in order.

 

That is why modern history must be different. It is too close to what should be sacred ground – bearing witness to passing events. There cannot be one truth for historians, and journalists, their apprentice draftsmen, and another truth called artistic licence.

 

When millions of viewers are told that both Diana and Thatcher were humiliated by the royal family at Balmoral, we should not have to rely on someone like Vickers to reply that this was utterly untrue. The correction will pass millions of viewers by.

 

The fib is far more fun. Yet it was curiously unnecessary, since there were plenty of occasions, as in Mirren’s interpretation, when royalty can be shown behaving badly. Morgan could have made his point truthfully.

 

Laws of privacy, defamation and slander have been built up over years to protect individuals against ever more surveillance and intrusion into personal lives. Most people support them, and increasing numbers use them. The Crown has taken its liberties by relying on royalty’s well-known – and sensible – reluctance to resort to the courts. This is artistic licence at its most cowardly as well as casual.

 

Fake history is fake news entrenched. To the legions of global cyber-warriors, fakery is legitimate hacking. To the trollers and spinners of lies, to leftwing conspiracy theorists and rightwing vaccine deniers, it is retaliation against power.

 

To documentary makers for whom ordinary facts are not colourful enough, not sufficiently damning, fake history carries the magic trump card: artistic licence.

 

Come the great new dawn of social media regulation, someone will build a structure of monitoring and mediating access to the world’s screens. Heaven forbid the equivalent of a board of film censors, but some regulation there must be. All we need is a simple icon in the top corner of the screen. It should read: F for fiction.

 

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist



The creator of “The Crown,” Peter Morgan, has never denied taking artistic license with the saga of the royal family.Credit...Des Willie/Netflix

 

‘The Crown’ Stokes an Uproar Over Fact vs. Entertainment

 

Dramatic liberties in the latest season of the Netflix series, covering the turbulent 1980s, are annoying Britons who wrote of that period, even among those who disparage the royals.

 


Mark Landler

By Mark Landler

Nov. 26, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/world/europe/Crown-Royals-Fact-Fiction.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

 

LONDON — On a Saturday night in July 1986, a band of bureaucrats in raincoats — one contingent from Buckingham Palace, the other from 10 Downing Street — converged on a newsstand in a train station to snap up The Sunday Times, fresh off the presses with a bombshell headline: “Queen dismayed by ‘uncaring’ Thatcher.”

 

It’s a dramatic flourish from the latest season of the “The Crown” — except, according to Andrew Neil, the paper’s editor at the time, it never happened. “Nonsense,” he said. “All first editions are delivered to both” the palace and the prime minister’s residence, making a late-night dash to buy the paper superfluous.

 

Mr. Neil, who published the famous scoop about tensions between Queen Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher, said the invented scene had allowed Peter Morgan, the creator of the hugely popular Netflix series about the British royal family, to depict 1980s London as a place of “squalor and vagabonds.”

 

Through four vivid seasons of “The Crown,” Mr. Morgan has never denied taking artistic license with the saga of the royals, playing out their private joys and sorrows against the pageant of 20th-century British history.

 

Yet “The Crown” is now colliding with the people who wrote the first draft of that history.

 

That has spun up a tempest in the British news media, even among those who ordinarily profess not to care much about the monarchy. Newspapers and television programs have been full of starchy commentary about how “The Crown” distorts history in its account of the turbulent decade in which Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer and Mrs. Thatcher wrought a free-market revolution in British society.

 

The objections range from the personal (the queen’s brittle, coldhearted treatment of her emotionally fragile daughter-in-law, which the critics claim is unfair) to the political (the show’s portrait of Thatcher-era Britain as a right-wing dystopia, in the grip of a zealous leader who dares to lecture her sovereign during their weekly audiences). Historians say that is utterly inconceivable.

 

“There has been such a reaction because Peter Morgan is now writing about events many of us lived through and some of us were at the center of,” said Mr. Neil, who edited The Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994.

 

Mr. Neil, who went on to be a broadcaster and publisher, is no reflexive defender of the royal family. Suspicious of Britain’s class system, he said he had sympathies for the republican movement in the 1980s. But he grew to admire how the queen modernized the monarchy after the upheaval of those years, and has been critical of renegade royals, like Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan.

 

The events involving Mr. Neil did happen: The queen became frustrated with Mrs. Thatcher when she refused to join the 48 other members of the British Commonwealth in backing sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. This highly unusual clash spilled into public when The Sunday Times published its front-page report, attributed to palace officials, which said the royal family viewed Mrs. Thatcher as “uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive.”

 

But Mr. Neil disputed several elements of “The Crown’s” retelling, not least that Buckingham Palace made the queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, the scapegoat for the incident. The show depicts his being fired for having leaked the story, even though it suggests that he did so at the queen’s behest. There is no evidence of this, Mr. Neil said, but it fits Mr. Morgan’s “left-wing agenda.”

 

“He gets to depict Thatcher as pretty much an ally of apartheid while the queen is the sort of person who junks loyal flunkies when things go wrong, even when they are just doing her bidding,” Mr. Neil said.

 

The brickbats are not just from the right.

 

Simon Jenkins, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian, regards members of the royal family as artifacts of celebrity culture irrelevant to a country grappling with real-world challenges like Brexit. “They are practically defunct,” he said. “They are like anthropomorphized figures of a head of state.”

 

Yet he, too, is angered by how “The Crown” portrayed the events of the 1980s, when, as political editor of The Economist, he wrote about how Prince Charles had been drawn to the now-defunct Social Democratic Party. (He based the report on an off-the-record interview with the prince.) Mr. Jenkins said that because this season of “The Crown” deals with contemporary history and people who are still alive, its liberties with the facts are less a case of artistic license than an example of “fake news.”

 

“I find it offensive when people dump standards of veracity in relating contemporary history,” Mr. Jenkins said. “If I did that as a journalist, I’d be hauled up before the press council while these people get prizes.”

 

Like others, Mr. Jenkins pointed to an episode-by-episode analysis by Hugo Vickers, a royal historian, which found whoppers large and small in the series and has become Exhibit A for its prevarications.

 

Not everybody faults Mr. Morgan for filling in the missing pieces with conjured scenes, even if he jumbles the facts in the process. (Mrs. Thatcher’s son, Mark, was not lost in the desert during the Paris-Dakar auto rally just as his mother was preparing to go to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands; hostilities broke out a few months after he was found.)

 

Charles Moore, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph who wrote a three-volume biography of Mrs. Thatcher, praised Gillian Anderson’s performance as the prime minister, putting it on a par with Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning turn in the 2011 film “The Iron Lady.” Even a much-criticized episode in which a snobbish queen plays host to a fish-out-of-water prime minister and her husband, Denis, at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, struck him as having “the ring of truth,” despite some embellishments.

 

 “The Crown,” Mr. Moore said, is trying to have it both ways, selling itself to audiences as a true story while clearing out the extraneous debris of facts that would gum up its dramatic narrative. “There is this thing called the tyranny of fact,” he said. “But as we get to modern times, it gets harder to avoid.”

 

Mr. Morgan declined to respond to the criticisms, though he told The New York Times this month that he was mindful that this season would be held to closer scrutiny. The producers mined the copious news reports of the period, as well as biographies of Charles and Diana, which contained firsthand accounts of their misbegotten union.

 

What is depicted in the family’s private moments, however, is “an act of creative imagination,” Mr. Morgan has said.

 

Behind the frustration with “The Crown” is a recognition that, right or wrong, its version of the royal family is likely to serve as the go-to narrative for a generation of viewers, particularly young ones, who do not remember the 1980s, let alone the more distant events covered in earlier seasons.

 

“They’ll watch it and think this is the way it was,” said Dickie Arbiter, who served as a press secretary to the queen from 1988 to 2000. He took issue with parts of the plot, including a scene in which aides to Charles question Diana about whether she is mentally stable enough to travel alone to New York City.

 

“I was actually at that meeting,” Mr. Arbiter said. “No courtier would ever say that in a million years.”

 

The biggest problem, said Penny Junor, who has written biographies of  Charles, Diana and Mrs. Thatcher, is that “The Crown” is a prodigiously effective piece of entertainment. That, she says, poses a particular threat to Charles, who arguably comes off worst in the series and who is likely to ascend the throne before memories of his grim, hunched portrayal have completely faded.

 

“It is wonderful television,” Ms. Junor said. “It is beautifully acted — the mannerisms are perfect. But it is fiction, and it is very destructive.”

 

Mark Landler is the London bureau chief. In 27 years at The Times, he has been bureau chief in Hong Kong and Frankfurt, White House correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, European economic correspondent, and a business reporter in New York. @MarkLandler

 

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