Read on Twitter
So one of the things I sort of missed during my time away from twitter was a lot of the reaction to Season 4 of the Crown and particularly the debates about fact and fiction and potentially ‘fiction warnings’ for historical drama
I am (although its been a bit on hold over the last year or so) working on a book project about the British Monarchy in TV Drama so do have a few thoughts about it so am hoping to be able to make the #TheCrownRoundtable which @IPUPYORK MA students are hosting tomorrow evening…
If any of you are interested in fact and fiction and historical accuracy in Historical Drama and haven’t already please see the many excellent threads and pieces by the likes of (particularly) @Hannah_Greig and @greg_jenner
or if you are interested more specifically in The Crown @royalhistorian has done some interesting fact v. fiction assessments of it including some nice review threads for the individual episodes of Season 4
If you are interested in the longer history of these debates I have been reflecting on one of my other case studies, Thames Television’s 1978 ‘Edward and Mrs Simpson’ starring Edward Fox and Cynthia Harris about the 1936 Abdication Crisis
This was sort of The Crown of its day, attracting large audiences, winning numerous awards and selling well internationally
It was also of course, like The Crown, depicting events and people within living memory for some (though obviously not all) viewers
There were people who felt that it attempted to twist history into soapy trash, and a lot of people who felt that it was distasteful to depict events in living memory especially because Mrs Simpson (by this point the Duchess of Windsor) was still alive
In fact she herself complained about it – she asked to be able to give prior approval to the scripts which she was denied and when it was aired she was widely understood to be very distressed that she and Edward had been misrepresented.
Interestingly the series was reshown in Britain in 1986 to mark her death…
One thing I have found interesting in the ‘fiction warning’ debate about The Crown is that as far as I know, Peter Morgan has always been fairly clear that he prioritises drama - he is (officially at least) all about artistic licence, entertainment before historical accuracy…
…and any political agenda is at most a fairly soft one – eg. an apparently sympathetic portrayal of Thatcher in the Balmoral episode while later episodes are certainly much more critical of her and overall balance of sympathy seems to swing towards the Queen by the final episode
In contrast Edward and Mrs Simpson's director, Waris Hussein, countered accusations that it was distasteful to portray recent history at least whilst the Duchess was still alive and distressed, with idea that critiquing Monarchy through drama was in the national interest...
...and that he wanted to swing the storytelling in favour of Edward VIII’s Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin who he felt was often cast as the villain of the story in public histories of the abdication crisis
- to defend a democratically elected official over a king who thought he was above the law.
