But Will There Be Corgis? Thread Where We Discuss Netflix's THE CROWN

HELLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
https://peopledotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/the-crown-1024.jpg

I blew through 3 episodes last night and I'm really enjoying it.

I love how the drama is provided by what's happening, they're not being heavyhanded and adding any excess unnecessary melodrama. I was a bit leery that they might Downton it up too much but it's very restrained.

I've heard they're planning to do SIX seasons, to cover the whole reign. Which...holy shit I'm in if it's going to be like this.

They do a very good job of underlining how the role of king/queen weighs very heavily on the person and the family -- like 'ugh my life would have been so much better if this had not happened to me' --- the duty is underscored very intentionally, and they do a good job of showing how disruptive it is to 'normal' life' (normal being landed aristocracy of course so, yknow, lol) (but still)

Jared Harrris' King George was so good

still finishing episode 2. will be really thankful when the coughing stops. the king is dead. long live the cough.

when he isn't coughing i love his voice though.

which makes sense cuz he comes from royal voice stock.

does this go into brenda's origins as a 12-ft baby-eating lizard-person or nah

xp
you wouldn't say that about his accent in The Expanse.

He is listed as being in 7 eps on imdb so I presume much flashbacking and maybe not so much coughing to come.

lol whut xp

i was wiki-ing the various royal family members and i honestly had forgotten about fergie. i just hadn't thought of her in years. so much info on her house and her house next to her ex's house and that house burning and then her moving back in with her ex and her ex borrowing money from the convicted pedophile who is friends with donald trump and....i think i see why people like royal watching so much. it's endless.

get woke veg: http://www.neonnettle.com/feed/67-david-icke-was-right-5-reasons-the-queen-is-a-bloody-lizard-

lol :D

Casting of Matt Smith as Prince Philip is ludicrous, Phil was impossibly good looking - in an Aryan Master Race way - as a young man, Matt Smith not so much.

i wouldnt go that far, i think Smith embodies some of his inherent charm

http://media.vanityfair.com/photos/54ca8cbb494254fc09953fbb/master/pass/image.jpg

https://lisawallerrogers.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/queen-elizabeth-and-prince-philip-engagement-july-9_1947.jpg

That's impossibly good looking? I'd have sAid Smith was about as gl if not better. A matter of taste I guess but they're about in the same league.

"even his testicles looked like red rosy apples"

ep5 opener: Little Lizzy helping her Dad by pretending to be Archbishop for the coronation gave me all the feels damn this show to hell

<3

also I never knew about that great smog business. 12,000? blimey.

worst killer fog in history.

i was definitely feeling the end of that second episode. DRAMA.

that whole second episode was just really great t.v. kudos!

streaking ahead sorry but

Coronation: a+
They used Edward so cleverly in this episode in particular, drag him to his bitchy lowest in the earlier episodes to allow him a bittersweet moment in the sun, very nicely done

Never gave much thought to actual practicality of walking in the crown

bit of the og magic show

ugh
https://youtu.be/LEDp34MRI20

probably useless storming into a binge thread 11 hours late but we just watched the first episode and i'm super-impressed by john lithgow's spot-on churchill impression through ~actual acting~ and not just gimmickry. i can't imagine what it's like for a showrunner to take an established actor with an already phenomenal legacy and give them something entirely new that will propel their stature even further.

I've heard they're planning to do SIX seasons, to cover the whole reign. Which...holy shit I'm in if it's going to be like this.

― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, 6 November 2016 07:39 (eleven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and with their intended focus on peripheral members of the monarchy it's easy to see how they'll fill it. the scope for quality drama is mind-blowing.

yeah definitely

I really enjoy lithgow as churchill too. I also enjoy them utilizing churchill in his second prime-ministership as much as they do; post-stroke churchill is not as often shown or used in drama & it is quite fascinating to see that "fading glory" portrayed by such a good actor

i didn't expect there to be as much use of peripheral characters - it definitely helps paint the picture more fully

claire foy looks so uncannily like a close friend of my mum's did when younger that i don't know how to end this post

i already said this on the wolf hall thread but :0

the queen in her old age reminds me of my grandma, and young Lizzy reminds me of my Mum
it's weird all round

capt peter townshend also reminds me of someone i know quite well

plus queen mary (of teck, george vi's mum, with the grey curls) uses the same asthma inhaler as i did as a kid! (tho she has a fancy mouthpiece also)

lol matt smith's face when the the plane lands after his flying lesson (which i just this second watched) is SOOOO DOCTOR WHOOO

so far i haven't mind him his as philip, but he should stay away from airmen's leather helmets

that first scene of his flying lesson with the deadstick landing is a good example of why I like this show.
In a Downton setting there would have been HIGH DRAMA and pleading for the engine to be turned back on and some kind of STAKES and a lot of music

But no

Two chill dudes just kill the engine, chat for a bit, and then deadstick land the plane in a field and it's cool af

yes -- except prince philip has turned into doctor who during the flight :)

this is paywalled only but well worth it on the fog: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n19/neal-ascherson/brown-goo-like-marmite

hmmm, there doesn't seem to be any "yas queen" memes featuring Claire Foy yet. Somebody's asleep at the wheel

Blimey, some of the fog stuff is like Threads.

Halfway through ep 9, one more to go

Every time Phillip disappoints Lizzy I think back to that promise he made to King George that he would stand by her & i get really mad. then I think how incredibly strong she must have been to weather so much without the steadfast support she should have had from him & it makes her a little bit more impressive in my eyes

Envying the Queen Mum's Scottish castle

Still, up against the wall with the lot of them, Bolsheviks had the right idea etc.

yeah I'm not going to go subscribing to Women's Weekly anytime soon

it just gives me an appreciation for the weird difficulties of a job that basically asks you to do nothing

Yeah, I do feel for Phil. He has no job and no real purpose. Maybe he thought he would be doing a lot of the work, or that she would at least share more with him, come to him for advice, that kind of thing? I suppose neither of them realised she'd be thrown into it so soon.

Although I guess that's what all that horse-stud business is about: him having no real job any more, now that he's done his job by her.

idk

they'd been prepping her for queen her whole life, idk what Phil thought would happen

i mean, i'm sympathetic to an extent- it's obv a very unforgiving job esp for surrounding family. but he just seems so stubbornly petulant & not very empathetic to the inherent loneliness she's dealing with

Jared Harris is so good. Bloody love him after this and Mad Men, and fuck it, I'll even take that accent in the Expanse too.

yeah he is A+ perfect in this

i'd love a prequel season showing his wartime years, the family in london after the blitz, etc

It's all so delicately done, reminds me a bit of the early golden british drama era, the Brideshead Revisiteds, very far from the deluge of period fluff in the wake of Downton Abbey

otm

idk what Phil thought would happen

I think he thought that it would be more of a partnership, like Churchill and his wife. He obviously has plenty of good ideas - like televising the coronation.

true

i just hate the petulant absenteeism & carousing

"i'd love a prequel season showing his wartime years, the family in london after the blitz, etc"

A bunch of priv Naziphiles waiting for their government to stop this nonsense and sue for peace might not cut it as a worldwide hit netflix series tbh. I wish next time Netflix have a spare 100m and loads of good actors, they will do a House of Plantagenet epic or something.

Seems the spat on the Australia tour in front of the film crew did actually happen

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/it-happens-even-in-royal-marriages-20110927-1kvi8.html

I said this on the Westworld thread already but:

Game of Thrones credit sequence: mechanical mapworld comes into being before your eyes.

Vinyl credit sequence: an LP comes liquidly into being before your eyes.

Westworld credit sequence: various biobots come liquidly into being before your eyes.

The Crown credit sequence: molten metal liquidly becomes a crown before your eyes.

I think we've found the MMteens' dominant visual cliché. It's the new teal & orange.

Oh and btw ilx hath infected my brain so thoroughly that at the beginning of E3 all I could think was YES! THERE ARE, INDEED, MOTHERFUCKING CORGIS.

:D

the Corgis just turned up though. I wanted an origin story

I finished the final ep last night

A+, looking forward to more in the future if it's more of this calibre of storytelling.

The stuff between Lizzy & Margaret in ep10 is so sad & kinda gutwrenching to watch it play out even when you know what's coming. Actress who plays margaret is so good

do they explain the awful hats?

Jared Harris currently brilliant in Certain Women btw

no hat explanation sry morbs

Daredevil has the same opening sequence design too.

matt smith should play frankenstein's monster in something. he looks like frankenstein's monster.

i will get back to this soon. thanks, trump!

apropos of nothing I am really into the Queen + land rover + headscarf + gumboots look, it's a real winner for me

the woman clare foy reminds me of also rocked that look -- well, not the land rover, she had a SHOOTING BRAKE instead

or actually one of those half-timbered morris minor travellers full of smelly king charles spaniels

http://www.classicandsportscar.ltd.uk/images_catalogue/large/morris-minor-traveller_17586.jpg

watched this last weekend (except for episode one which my wife had already watched), certainly addictive. matt smith is great as philip in this, since I only ever think of him as an ancient horrible racist monster. princess margaret is much too pretty in this compared to her real life self.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/80/d6/4f/80d64f2c25860c419df4a01024e5b8c0.jpg

xp really? i always thought margaret was v beautiful as a young lady

Like a good looking version of the Queen.

p much yeah

looking thru her pix on GiS she's one of those people who just looks really -- almost unrecognisably --- different in different photos, at least until she worked out her glam mojo in the 60s

Margaret was royal family attractive. Vanessa Kirby is attractive attractive

from either eavesdropping on some misspeak from my mum or something misheard when I was a kid, for most of my adult life I was convinced she had an affair with Pete Townsend.

haha

anyway margaret def best 'character' here, love it when she takes over while queeney is away and just says whatever the fuck she wants

also, next series needs more dog

best character is elizabeth, forzen at the centre dissolving herself in duty; margaret is the most fun character

yeah elizabeth for me is the best character; rmde @ margaret & phillip with their endless "wants" & "needs" worse than actual corgis imo (/jk)

maybe it's just the older sister in me that sympathizes with lizzy

it's fucking hard work being the square responsible one!

this is v good but i have to remind myself what kind of life i'm seeing, what's being dramatized. lethal smog has the same weight as whether philip has enough to do day to day.

yeah I'm a bit torn between thinking ^that is kind of the point of the series and wondering if I should really be spending hours contemplating said basically appalling point. In TV drama terms though, so far my only real complaint is that Edward is no fun as a villain, he's just really contemptible and joyless to spend time with.

he isn't the villain, he's the warning

I had a feeling "villain" might be objected to, and I don't disagree about his importance to the show's central idea of the function of the monarchy. Maybe it's the actor? I stand by "joyless to spend time with" so when he's central to an episode I find them a bit more of a slog (but I'm only halfway through in case that matters).

as an american i shd probably look into what duties the monarch has. the 'heavy hangs the crown' type stuff between harris and foy is the show's strongest, but again i'm like... why. why is it like this.

It seemed like that to them. At the time.

Not an expert on this by any means but it seems like in 195whatever they still had a huge hangover from empire and from, of course, the wars, where they felt the idea of the steady "leadership" of a dutiful self-effacing monarch made a bit more sense.

As they do less and less of consequence nowadays, they're just reality-show-type celebrities given stilts by history, so it seems silly to us now. But even non-royal britishes in 1952ish might well have regarded the persons and fates of individual royals as a sort of proxy for the national identity, in the way perhaps that we regard sports stars. To what extent is Cleveland's fate entwined with LeBron's? It isn't, except for the person who feels that it is.

yes, the series is basically about duty vs the call of modernity (which is already super-unusual, i can't actually think of another drama that's done this in the present-day era)

my feeling (having watched it all) is that it's surprsingly harsh on ppl who don't usually get harshed on (churchill, for one): but yes, it is entirely (and deliberately) told from inside the buck house bubble

i suspect if it had tried to make much of the view from outdside, it would actually probably sentimentalise both

i also suspect that it will get less rigorous as it approaches the present

my favoutite exchange was a burn from queen mary (of teck, aka edward/george's mum) pointing out that philip's family (the schleswig-holstein-sonderburg-glücksburgs) are jumped up parvenus, whose line did not -- of course -- go back a thousand years

it was just to win a minor family argument but she was irritated

From the perspective of now, the royals who basically said "hey, we're rich and we have basically nothing to do, so let's just party and fuck" are actually sort of on the right side of history. The ones who thought they had a moral obligation to lead, set a good example, and carefully read government documents actually come off looking sorta like chumps. Because a parliamentary government can run fine without them (in fact, most do).

But just like we take the internal logic of a show seriously when we watch "The Tudors" or "Wolf Hall" or "Man for All Seasons" or, heck, "Game of Thrones," to enjoy "The Crown" requires inhabiting, however temporarily, its point of view.

That said, "The Crown" might be made more exciting with tits 'n' dragons.

i think the approach will make it v interesting in later seasons - all of the things that Elizabeth has to give up, repress, compromise & reject entirely now will all become (for her) depressingly moot as her role as queen becomes more & more meaningless

The ones who thought they had a moral obligation to lead, set a good example, and carefully read government documents actually come off looking sorta like chumps.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=FTQ

yes -- and i think it's a bit deeper even than this, as well, bcz the ones who say "let's party and fuck" (who are totally the ones who make sense, even more in the 60s than the 50s, are also the ones where it's obvious that they're doing nothing to justify the colossal privilege: elizabeth's determination is a double one, to prove she can be a satisfactory monarch even though she's a young girl with a very odd and inadequate education (except in the constitution), one that can match up to her dad, and victoria and the other semi-mythical elizabeth, but also to justify the privilege by an iron committment to a selfless version of the duty she owes and the role she must commit to (the dowdiness is an expression of this, like the other elizabeth's quasi-holy virginity)

^^^which is a bonkers insupportable topsyturvy view, but without it, there's just nothing left to ground the wealth and the palaces, etc, as any kind of equitable settlement -- and that's where elizabeth is coming from

re the constitution: she refers to bagehot* when he comes into conversation as "badgett", but her teacher -- a professor with a northern accent, who drinks -- calls him "batshit"... which is not IMO an accident

*(walter bagehot, the 19th centry theorist of the constitution and apologist for the victorian monarchy)

until i watched this i don't think i ever *fully* appreciated just how insane the mythology of the monarchy is when applied to a human being

It has been announced Brenda is getting a £370 mill full electrical/mechanical refurb to her house scot free, now that's what you call full bennies.

Just finished watching this with Kate (ie, my girlfriend, not a certain princess) over the past few days. Good stuff, all points above taken on board of course.

Our favorite character was the mustachioed hatchetman.

"Bon voyage."

he was so good!

Pretty much whenever he appeared on screen I assumed he was about to have someone killed.

marming like a badass

= tommy lascelles (rhymes with tassles)

his royal mustache

I rather enjoyed this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3657397/A-most-devoted-subject-and-a-most-exacting-critic.html

Tommy's bête noir was the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII and ultimately Duke of Windsor. "He is the most attractive man I have ever met," Tommy declared on appointment to his household in 1921. Disillusionment was swift. "I have wasted the best years of my life," he said after resigning in 1929, outraged by the Prince's neglect of duty and loose morals.

Half a century later, when I was writing a biography of George V, I asked Lascelles what he remembered of the King, who had summoned him back to royal service in 1935. He said: "The King gave me an MVO for looking after his son. It was the hardest-earned medal I ever had." From a man who had won a Military Cross on the Western Front, that was indeed a savage epitaph on the Prince.

He wrote no less bitterly of Mrs Simpson in his retrospect of the Abdication crisis printed in the present volume: "The vast majority of the King's subjects… would not tolerate their Monarch taking as his wife, and their Queen, a shop-soiled American, with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw."

Also what the hell:

Tommy undoubtedly gave a steadying hand to a master notorious for his outbursts, and it was his diplomacy that kept both the King and Churchill on dry land after each had declared his intention of watching the D-Day bombardment of the French coast from a cruiser.

whoa

I loved that awesome temper tantrum by the King in ep1 when he is getting ready

And learning about Antony Eden's health problems, jeez:

Eden had an ulcer, exacerbated by overwork, as early as the 1920s. His life was changed forever by a medical mishap: during an operation on 12 April 1953, to remove gallstones, his bile duct was damaged, leaving Eden susceptible to recurrent infections, biliary obstruction, and liver failure. He suffered from cholangitis, an abdominal infection which became so agonising that he was admitted to hospital in 1956 with a temperature reaching 106 °F (41 °C). He required major surgery on three occasions to alleviate the problem. Eden would almost certainly have become Prime Minister when Churchill suffered a severe stroke on 23 June 1953, had he not been recovering from corrective surgery in the United States on the same day.

He was also prescribed Benzedrine, the wonder drug of the 1950s. Regarded then as a harmless stimulant, it belongs to the family of drugs called amphetamines, and at that time they were prescribed and used in a very casual way. Among the side effects of Benzedrine are insomnia, restlessness, and mood swings, all of which Eden suffered during the Suez Crisis; indeed, earlier in his premiership he complained of being kept awake at night by the sound of motor scooters. Eden's drug use is now commonly agreed to have been a part of the reason for his bad judgment while Prime Minister. Eden was secretly hospitalised with a high fever, possibly as a result of his heavy medication, on 5–8 October 1956. He underwent further surgery at a New York hospital in April 1957.

In November 2006, private papers uncovered in the Eden family archives disclosed that Eden had been prescribed a powerful combination of amphetamines and barbiturates called drinamyl. Better known in post-war Britain as "purple hearts", the drug can impair judgement, cause paranoia, and even make the person taking them lose contact with reality. Drinamyl was banned in 1978

Lascelles was great, yeah

best moment in the show is the dressing down the Queen gives to Churchill and Salisbury

the drug can impair judgement, cause paranoia, and even make the person taking them lose contact with reality.

The ideal modern politician.

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to invade Egypt"

lol

bennies, huh. well that's the most fun anyone's had as PM surely

Something else I didn't realize -- Eden's widow is still alive...and is a niece of Winston Churchill!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarissa_Eden

looked up the lascelles family, vaguely hoping they'd been Gormenghastly Keeper of the Mustache since the norman conquest, telling monarchs no for 1000 years -- turns out the earliest one that's well enough known to get into wikipedia is francis, during the civil war, who was mp for stank and north allerton -- and a regicide latterly in the barebones parliament

i've probably already posted the story i know abt eden at some point down the years : he was friends with ian fleming -- james bond is also a benzedrine enthusiast -- and after one of his illnesses went to stay in jamaica at fleming's holiday house goldeneye… the awfulness of the food in the fleming household was legendary, and eden was convinced he was hallucinating large rats in the rafters (he wasn't, they were real-life rats)… more rattled than rested, he returned to downing street to handle the suez crisis

Eden and the Suez seems to be a walking, talking 'what not to do.'

yeah no kidding

My gift to ilx is this image of CORGIS IN SWEATERS

http://cdn-img.instyle.com/sites/default/files/styles/684xflex/public/1481064512/120616-Royal-Family-ugly-sweaters-NEW.jpg

lol

Just started this, so good

Based on that photo, one of the important functions of modern British royalty is to provide comic relief. Presumably the UK needs such jollity at the moment.

based on that post, one might think you thought that was a photo of people

the continued existence of the british royalty provides no relief - only disgust

saw a trailer for this prog "it's a revolution from the inside" or some such trash

the only thing I like inspired by contemporary british royalty of which I can think is king charles III a play and I guess anarchy in the UK a song

I'm ashamed to admit that it was only the novelty double sweater that made me realise the above photo is not real.

Anyway, I've been watching this series, just finished episode 8... And while it's very well made and entertaining without falling for needless scandalisation of well-known historical events, I'm a bit surprised that it doesn't really provide any proper voice that'd be critical of the continued existence of monarchy in a Western democracy. Especially since it's such an ensemble piece with multiple viewpoints, and yet the only critical words to that effect so far were uttered by the newspaper editor, who was only a small bit character and mostly painted as a villain who caused poor Margaret's breakup with the Who guitarist.

Some of Philips's quips seem to also hint at this direction, but they're mostly just used to illustrate his frustration of being the Queen Husband with no deeper critical implications.

I mean, I get it that the writer and most of the intended audience are probably staunch royalists, but it seems pretty absurd that in a series that otherwise tries to provide a fairly objective look into monarchy in a time period where is becoming increasigly obsolete, they have no one stating the obvious and saying that it is. Surely 1950s Britain already had some anti-monarchists among leftists etc? The absence of that feels like a gaping hole in the side of the narrative that it just refuses to accept. (Unless that happens in the last two episode that I havent' yet watched?)

"that it just refuses to acknowledge"

The antiroyalist perspective is also missing from Game of Thrones, Excalibur, Frozen, Cinderella, and Star Wars iirc.

I am not sure I agree that "the writer and most of the intended audience are probably staunch royalists"; it's more like "this is the story they wanted to tell."

FWIW ex-King David says some stuff about how it's perfectly rational to prefer ceremonial magic to boring truth.

The Little Mermaid needed more scenes about the exploitation of the mollusks

The antiroyalist perspective is also missing from Game of Thrones, Excalibur, Frozen, Cinderella, and Star Wars iirc.

Are you being serious? In case y
ou are, this series is clearly framed as a fair realistic and multifaceted look into the role of the monarch in a modern society, while

...Cinderella isn't. So it's not unfair to accept the former to address the huge question that's inextricably tied to its central theme. Cinderella deals with something totally different than the justification of the position of the monarch.

"it's not unfair to expect"

i would say it's framed as a fair realistic and multifaceted look into the role of the monarch in a modern society from the perspective of the monarchy and the people who support it

there are like character perspectives in the season from maybe two people who aren't part of the monarchy or supporting government and one of them gets hit by a bus

it's framed as a fair realistic and multifaceted look into the role of the monarch in a modern society from the perspective of the monarchy and the people who support it

Exactly. My examples were over the top on purpose, but if you want different ones they can be supplied. Johnny Cash biopic that is silent on punk rock. Nature documentaries that fail to address the booming nightclub scene. The point is merely that perspective and canvas size are a legitimate concern in making entertainment.

Yes, there is a story to be told about people who don't give a shit about the Duke of Whatsis and the Marquess of Thingydoodle. This is not that story. If you want to film that story go do it; no one is stopping you.

this series is clearly framed as a fair realistic and multifaceted look…

no it isn't, not at all: it's framed as the exploration of an institution and a practice and a belief system strictly as it impacts on the people right in the middle of it, the human drama of the logic of the constitutional issues, which it takes unexpected care to lay out, making little attempt to explore anything beyond the palace walls except insofar as it affects the central characters, and that's one of its strengths IMO

you're also wrong abt the journalists being set up as the villains: the villain in the destruction of margaret's happiness is -- according to how you judge elizabeth's decision to commit to royal duty -- either the institution of monarchy itself (its ruthless sacrificial demands, if you like, and elziabeth courageously bowing to them) or else elizabeth, treating her setting her duty ahead of her firm promise to her sister as a kind cowardice

if they're royalists -- not at all evident to me -- then they're royalists taking an unusually icy and unsentimental view of the monarchy at this particular time: they really dig down into the harshness of this choice elizabeth has to make (in contrast to david, who as edward viii followed his feelings, an act which, as the queen mum's furiously argues and eliziabeth clearly believes, basically killed his brother bertie aka george vi); it's the central topic of this whole first series

in other words, she portray her as faced with a choice between two modes of cowardice, equally unpleasant personally -- and the approach the makers have (fairly rigorously and i think rather admirably) taken is teasing out the contradictions and ugliness of the entire thing from within; and not making a song and dance of them, or giving us anti-royalists anyone to identify with. i think if someone were parachuted to give a nice wave&wink to us moderns that yes, this entire thing is foolish and we know better now, it would be much harder to do that, besides being fairly ahistorical (obviously plenty of people existed in the early 1950s who believed the institution was a bad thing, but they weren't people elizabeth was routinely engaging with)

(it's going to be really interesting in the next series -- when the next phase of anti-colonial activity will greatly ramp up: the mau mau uprising in kenya and so on -- what their treatment is going to be… it's much more ticklish material than anything they faced so far, and their approach may come to pieces, along with my defence here) (i don't have high hopes of the project in the medium term, i think it's bitten off more than it's likely to be able to chew, but so far i've been surprised and impressed)

i think the version you have in mind, tuomas, would just have sentimentalised both sides of the argument -- basically turned into into an earnest and anachronistic op-ed discussion of the pros and cons of a particular constitutional arrangement… what they've done is much more interesting and much more daring, besides i think being truer to quite how alien britain after the war in the early 50s is to us (exhausted, much poorer, with its empire and its might slipping away, determined to believe, not entirely unjustifiably, that almost alone of the european nations 1939-45 it hadn't compromised with fascism, that its ancient institutions had something to be said for them… except also knowing they were going to have to change anyway, and how is this going to happen, and what's it like to be right in the middle of it, from the perspective of a young, fairly bright, very stubborn, extremely oddly educated woman, who never get to resign and move out of the spotlight)

anyway, you should be on my ROBA thread talking abt finnish police procedurals

(its ruthless sacrificial demands, if you like, and elziabeth courageously bowing to them)

^this needs unpacking a bit, since it's not unreasonable to see it more as her "courageously" sacrificing her sister's happiness -- the kind of courage i mean is her basically accepting her role in this is to be the shit, and seen as the shit, becuase that's what duty IS (which she and her dad understand, unlike her uncle who ran away from it); lol a bit like nixon's "secret honor" in the altman film

i said up thread that duty and the ethos of service is an unusual topic for a modern drama, and i stick with this -- even my lovely procedurals rarely explore this element of police life, and when they do it's explored collectively: "the crown" is abt elizabeth's solitude (except for her uncle, who she loathes)

the villain in the destruction of margaret's happiness is -- according to how you judge elizabeth's decision to commit to royal duty -- either the institution of monarchy itself (its ruthless sacrificial demands, if you like, and elziabeth courageously bowing to them) or else elizabeth, treating her setting her duty ahead of her firm promise to her sister as a kind cowardice

Or, in the way the series presents it, E. being machiavellianly manipulated by the machinations of Mustache Lascelles. Who may himself have been operating out of what he thought were good motives - preserve the mighty institution as opposed to the teeny feeeeewings of mere mortals - or he may have just liked the power he could exercise behind the scenes. E. could have chosen to go against all that institutional weight in order to keep her word to her sister, sure. But she also felt she needed advice/advisors, as she was alone and adrift in uncharted territory.

well, yes, lascelles is pretty much presented as the Face of How Things Must Be Done for most of the series, but by the end we know that E is getting a sense of what her powers (and capabilities) actually are, esp.after we see her face down churchill, so the margaret decision ends up being at least partly E's decision, rather than purely the system' inflexibility (as manifested in the mustache gormenghastly tradition)

incidentally i mentioned claire foy's resemblance to my mum's friend to my sister, and my sister said "oh, really?" (she hadn't watched this) and we googled CF and called up some pictures and my sister said "oh. my. god."

mark s otm itt

based on that post, one might think you thought that was a photo of people

It is a photo of the royal personages, which is equally true, whether it is a photo of actual royals, actors, or wax dummies at Madame Tussaud's. Or photoshopped.

Or, in the way the series presents it, E. being machiavellianly manipulated by the machinations of Mustache Lascelles. Who may himself have been operating out of what he thought were good motives - preserve the mighty institution as opposed to the teeny feeeeewings of mere mortals - or he may have just liked the power he could exercise behind the scenes.

this is an interesting type; reminded in a way of francis urquhart in the end of 'to play the king' who says something like, "my family came down with james the first, when you were a pack of german nobodies." the crown is a thing that can't ever be stable enough or legitimate enough for the people closest to it

i have trouble discerning the intent of the show but i think the critique of monarchy -- an idea that everyone has to serve, or beat themselves into a particular shape to serve -- is there

(xp) Looks nothing like Philip for a start.

they really dig down into the harshness of this choice elizabeth has to make (in contrast to david, who as edward viii followed his feelings, an act which, as the queen mum's furiously argues and eliziabeth clearly believes, basically killed his brother bertie aka george vi)

grim irony here in showing everyone smoking, esp mum on her deathbed. but elizabeth doesn't, right?

don't think we see her smoking -- the internet says she smoked as a teen but gave up after the war

i need to rewatch this tbh

she chides Philip for smoking at one point

yeah iirc her father's death put her off smoking for life or something to that effect

Ep 9 is damn good - the portrait of WC and the (vastly dramatised?) marital strife bet. QE and Philip.

She should have known what she was getting into, marrying a Time Lord and all.

started watching Victoria, UK really liking to biopic it's regents right now it seems. Crown is much better than Victoria btw which suffers from that ITV 'no scene longer than 45 seconds' problem

The old Masterpiece Theater series of Lillie and Edward the Seventh made me an Ed7 stan. Dude had his problems but he appears to have known how to live: drinking, fucking, eating, and living in lavish palaces.

We watched episode 9 last night and I have just found this picture of IRL Margaret, which I feel needs to be shared.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/5c/f6/9e/5cf69ef5597b7a7a7c2277313f793f78.jpg

Has Anthony Armstrong-Jones showed up yet? He's dead now anyway.

Nope, presumably he surfaces in the next season.

This is pretty fun. Pip Torrens as Tommy Lascelles takes the cake, and looks so much like Dirk Bogarde it's scary.

really looking forward to series XXI of this, with claire foy in yards-deep wrinkly rubber make-up and a euro-flag hat first doing a reverse diana on the then-PM, then winking cheekily back at the PM's successor as he stands flanked by the wicker giants GOG and MAGOG, and the entire worshipful company of fully automated luxury communists

I'm in.

All hail (in season 3) Queen Olivia.

http://ew.com/tv/2017/10/26/the-crown-claire-foy-olivia-colman/

Claire Foy is a babe

I like the way they say "The Crown has found its new star," like they searched far and wide for Olivia Colman.

i like her though

she will make a good, tired, really kind of fucking over this shit Lizzie

Oh, me too! It's just that "finding" her is hardly the Scarlett O'Hara search, is all I meant.

She will be brilliant.

Looking forward to Mountbatten getting blown up.

So much money pumped into this overblown project, and there are hardly any decent story arcs!

I hear there's a surprise main character death a few seasons down the line

Hope Lord Lucan turns up at some point.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51RCFJ79K0L._SX258_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Surely there's room for John Bindon hanging beer glasses off his todger?

This is so much better than any other Netflix show

i think it will get continue to be good sadly

also it is not better than REINA DEL SUR, the one true queen imo

Season 2 run date: December 8th. VG will stock up on tea and blankets and take the entire weekend off.

seriously tho is this the season where they explore brenda’s origins as a 12ft baby-eating lizard person

They will never be bold enough to reveal that these people are all fucking worthless fascist scum and all deserve to die in a pile of their own excrement.

but no, they to live to be 200 with titanium hips and bairns blood transfusions from Africa.

Ah so that's how James Cameron is rebooting The Terminator.

Sorry, I will shut up for the benefit of fans of this series. But these fucking people ..

oh shit YES i cannot wait

and as I have expressed previously, i am an on-record royals-hater... BUT this show is v v good

On board

Nice interview with Foy (I like the bit about how she's changed up her hair now that she's done with the role). Some spoilers, sorta.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/nov/29/the-crowns-claire-foy-im-a-deeply-angry-person-on-some-levels

WATCH SEASON 2 NOW

not actually NOW but v soon yes

"traficante muy famosa", as lyndon larouche sees it

I kinda hate the fact that I am watching this but who am I kidding, I am going to watch every corgifucking second of it.

corgi... fucking?

dnw

I AM V EXCITE TO QUEEN THIS WEEKEND

o how i have missed Clare Foy’s microexpressions

matthew goode <3 ugh i love him

need to watch s2 e1 again as i was semi-distracted for much of it by xmas admin but *applause* for the toothy goblin they found to play small charles

otm

am halfway through ep 3, loving it

Lost track of what episode I'm up to now (I think maybe 5?) but anyway it's got Alex Jennings in it and once again he's superb in the douchebag role. Most punchable character since Joffrey Baratheon

"not that we give a fig about the parkers and their happiness"

as far as i know in 1957, this was euphemising "not that we give a damn" but i liked the anachronistic way this was delivered, strongly to suggest "not that we give a fuck" (don't think brits said this 50 years ago, even very posh ones)

enjoying the game-of=thrones style macmillan also

This phrase comes from the Spanish Fico (Fig) which gave its name to a traditional gesture of contempt made by placing the thumb between the first and second fingers. The gesture was common in Shakespeare's time and was known as The Fig of Spain. The modern-day equivalent is the V sign.

https://word-ancestry.livejournal.com/9243.html

1. (don’t) give a damn
-The above phrase was originally I don’t give a dam (yes, the n is missing on purpose) and seems to have been brought back to England by military men traveling to India in the mid 18th century. A dam was an Indian coin of little value. After spreading to civilian usage, the phrase changed to I don’t give a damn and was first recorded in America in the 1890s

^^^never knew this (if it's true)

loved the episode abt the Duke -irl pics of irl Duke at the end particularly delicious

very early cryptic mention of the "sinister osteopath" -- i'm guessing (as of e3) this is foreshadowing profumo and keeler etc

"had a bit of a fumble at blenheim -- actress you know, quite a looker!"

this whole exchange is tremendous

Anna Massey was never that good looking though.

When Grigg* was leaving Television House, after giving an interview on ITV defending his article, a member of the League of Empire Loyalists came up to him and slapped his face, saying: "Take that from the League of Empire Loyalists."

= Lord Altrincham, who'd criticised the Queen in the press, was the second lord to quit a hereditary peerage after Lord Stansgate (= Tony Benn, who was the first) made it possible in law, and eventually -- *sigh* -- ended up in the SDP (admittedly arriving from the Tory direction).

Anyway, TAKE THAT FROM THE LEAGUE OF EMPIRE LOYALISTS. (Wikip: "Indeed, it has also been argued that although parts of its ideology overlapped with fascism the LEL was in fact much too reactionary to be considered truly fascist.")

fun hearing an actor doing a young robin day -- not exactly a demanding piece of mimicry, but well managed

probably shouldn't actually liveblog this ep (half of you already know all this, it's spoilers for everyone else)

also enjoying what a monster they've made the queen mum

(of course grigg joined the SDP: his approach to the monarchy was very proto-blair)

foy gives great frosty

fun hearing an actor doing a young robin day -- not exactly a demanding piece of mimicry, but well managed

Why, if it isn't Bertie Carvel, bless him.

"also enjoying what a monster they've made the queen mum"

erm.. good work by the writers there. I'm just being a churl, tempted to start this tonight tbh.

Turkish websites are there for those of us who CBA with Netflix.

God save the torrent sitez! We need them for leeching from the parasitic overlords that make dramatic content about .. nevermind.

I like the rich period detail in this so far, it goes beyond budgets and eye candy - it is very artfully evocative in a way that many modern period dramas that have pissed away similar budgets are not imo. But saying that, some of the Eden administration stuff is a bit sketchy and undercooked, but I'd probably prefer a drama that concentrated wholly on that side of the story in the same fashion.

Matt Smith's performance in the scene where they celebrate Margaret's engagement is A+. I laughed out loud.

ok lol at the la ronde-style sequence of bed scenes and the UNEXPECTED REVEAL

love the way the private secretaries are required essentially to be MENTATS

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/PiterDeVries-Brad_Dourif.jpg

(lascelles is btw meant to be 73: he is looking VERY good on it)

wait whut: tony armstrong jones also er stepping out with jackie chan and robin banks

this ceremony takes place a month and a day before i arrived in the world (for some reason they fail to mention that)

Got to the bit where current 'stache guy is made to shave. The 'stache is dead, long live the 'stache.

Felt genuinely sorry for him when he got told off because of the speech. Poor Michael. Or whatever his name is.

michael adeane

that whole thing where Phillip is made Prince was funny/infuriating ... is there truth to that?

like basically the show plays it that Phillip wants a HAT and a TITLE because he cant lad it up with the beardos on boats anymore & that’s how he’ll go along to get along

Matt Smith is v good at playing petulant and/or grumpy Phillip - it’s so convincing that i want to backhand him lol

oops Philip not Phillip etc

i think the only totally made-up thing so far is churchill's comely secretary who died in the great fog, but there's clearly been quite a lot of speculation behind the scenes re motivation

Dying at "lad it up with the beardos," thanks VG.

This season weirdly obsessed with facial hair and its discontents

i just looked this up and as well as duke of edinburgh he is apparently BARON GREENWICH

The Evil Baron Greenwich.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71V6oDBLWEL._SL1500_.jpg

the motivation of Snowdon marrying Margaret boiling down to “NOW look at me Mummy” meanwhile Mum’s all “sure” explains a lot about how that marriage played out - shit turned real nasty between him & Margaret after a while

i read years ago that he would slip “I hate you” notes in books she was reading

magz on the rebound from pete townshend not helping

foy and kirby are good as sisters, with this confrontation particularly strong: e2r powerless to get margaret to see past the good sex to the likely problem and margaret chilling on e2r's decision to be invisible in plain sight

magz on the rebound from pete townshend not helping

Snowden was a substitute for another guy.

tommy* can you hear me

*lascelles

yeah Foy & Kirby are killing it
you can almost see the miasma of unspoken ~feelings~ hanging over their heads whenever they are in a scene together, such great performances

*tiny little b&w TV fuzzes up*
*queen mum jumps up and bangs it vigorously on the side*
e2r: "no! mummy! it's RENTED!"

POTUS DEXTER :D

could just be the presence of qyburn making me think this but this ep is the most GoT to date

"it's just air!"

and here's the sinister osteopath >:)

Dexter's accent is inexplicably bad. Dude there are lots of tapes and films of Kennedy speaking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhHUbAPQ47E

good god President Dexter was hilariously awful

JFK trolling, more like a young Mayor Quimby
the only thing decent was his teeth and even then he barely had a good smile! and since when was he dark haired?

and poor Jackie had some thirsty, dollar-store looking hair

wow, Micheal C Hall is so bad he should be cast-rationed. Lol xps! at least he nailed Quimby. But It is a very jarring performance to say the fucking least. Ep 8 never recovered from that awfulness at all.

yeah like when JFK is assassinated in-show you’re like O THANK GOD the less we see of him the better

i did really love the final moment between Lizzie & Jackie though, and her mixed regrets over maintaining the high ground. idk, just in terms of succesful women navigating each other & the complexities that insecuruty brings

and claire foy, man when she hears the insults firsthand and her eyes fill with tears but she doesn’t buckle. killed me.

i never thought anything about Charles could reduce me to tears but here I am, end of ep 9, blubbering like a baby. god that was a hellish, troubling story. for both Phillip & Charles!

Welp, all done

Standing ovation, jolly good show old chaps.

Complexity in spades! jfc

Aw, I'll miss Foy 'n' Smith's knockabout antics. Will also particularly miss Vanessa Kirby.

They made bolder storytelling moves in the second season - starting in the middle of something then backing up several months, interleaving flashbacks, etc.

i never thought I'd lust after princess margaret but here i am

do you think william and kate and harry and megan sit around and watch this show and howl with laughter?

i wonder that too!

whole family sits in front of the telly like bacon's screaming pope iirc

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/56/Study_after_Velazquez%27s_Portrait_of_Pope_Innocent_X.jpg

I kept getting distracted by how much Claire Foy looks like Parker Posey in this.

Who's next to play Philip? Capaldi?

i love this show but the jfk/jackie o episode was maybe the worst one of all. i like michael c hall but his jfk was awful and his performance was just weird, and the jackie o performance was bizarre too, and she confessed all of their intimate secrets to elizabeth at like their second meeting ever???

So many things about that ep made exactly no sense. Both Kennedys were socially savvy and well-prepared by staff; they would not have Billy-Bobbed into the palace and started talking about their bowels.

I mean, if the point you want to make is "Americans are brash and informal while Britishes are polite and reserved," there's like a zillion other examples you could use.

LBJ probably woulda wiped his ass with a corgi and called Nehru "boy."

^ good ep idea for next season btw

Also "Americans are brash and informal while Britishes are polite and reserved" is a really lazy point btw

We're looking for something to binge. Watched the first three episodes of the first season - does it stay that good?

Yes. If anything, it gets better.

Definitely better. The swanky Margaret stuff is way more fun than Churchill in the fog, for instance.

agreed on that point, yes.

really curious to see what the next season of this is going to be like with different actors.

Well, except for the inbred parasite part. https://t.co/dYZxPc6tx1

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) January 16, 2018

also parasitic freeloaders freeholders is another good reason to see if the remains of L Mountbatten's skull would make a good dog frisbee.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/unsane-steven-soderbergh-experiment-paranoia?utm_content=bufferd2cce&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

are there any corgis in that y/n

p sure n

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV6RicRcjW0

this is going to be sensational, maybe use the same actors when this gets to s09.

And we have the new Prince Philip:

#TheCrown Sets Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip https://t.co/me9GCN2awV pic.twitter.com/31FyMDHoQ0

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) March 28, 2018

Hmm. He's got the look but I've never seen him act as well as Foy, Smith or Olivia Colman.

Hey so when will Margaret find out about Tony's polio leg?

Menzies was good in Casino Royale, and he was a+ in HBO’s Rome. I approve of the casting

He was really good in a dual role on Outlander. He'll do fine.

I'm five episodes into this now (finished the coronation earlier today). Already missing Foy and Smith knowing that they won't be around in future seasons and I still have 15 episodes of them to get through.

stoked for the future trump episode(s), he will be CANCELLED

herself will be played by olivia de havllland (103 in july), philip will literally just be some bones they throw around the room

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECpV52ZUcAEp4Gp?format=jpg&name=medium

Charles Moore spokesman for the Royal Physiognomy Trust.

footman, fetch me my callipers, i fear i see before me a skull of a distinctly suffragist shape

i mean to be fair to the lad he couldn’t look more like a sneering jackboot enthusiast if he tried

https://secure.i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03460/charles-moore-marg_3460335b.jpg

I look forward to future tech facial recognition software that can identity enemies of the people from basic physiognomy and target them for liquidation.

SOMEBODY is auditioning for the role of Professor Higgins in that pic

the queen has no face

Queen Without a Face

A few eps into the new season & so far so good!
Corgis is first ep THERE WILL BE CORGIS

New Philip is the dude from The Terror & Rome, right? Eeerily spot on with his voice.

Colman great obv. HBC’s margaret i havent quite adjusted to, still feels like HBC in nice dresses so far.

Aberfan ep incredibly heartbreaking - I had never heard of it til today.

I've never seen The Crown so I don't know if this is just a sour whinge...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/17/the-crown-tv-brexit-britain

I have seen the show and that seems fair enough

Although citing Colman in the The Favourite as an example of this kind of thing is pretty stupid

it lost me at G Oldman's Churchill performance as "worthy of praise". I can't think of a more cringeworthy, self-indulgent performance that should have got much more derision than it did, and it wasn't like he was a consummate pro putting in a good shift in an extremely shite movie.

Honestly, I think lumping The Crown in with Downton Abbey as a misty-eyed portrayal of a great British past just shows that the writer has not watched The Crown.

Like, maybe it's my Irish perspective, but storylines like Margaret charming the Johnsons in order to get a massive bailout for Britain do not make Britain or the royal family look good. They make everyone look craven and corrupt.

it lost me at G Oldman's Churchill performance as "worthy of praise". I can't think of a more cringeworthy, self-indulgent performance that should have got much more derision than it did, and it wasn't like he was a consummate pro putting in a good shift in an extremely shite movie.

Playing Churchill is a green light for self-indulgent hamming for any actor tbf.

The Crown does a good job of mirroring the viewers prejudices. It can be pro or anti monarchy depending on what you look for in it. Take Phillips speech in ep2 about the impossibility of equality. You can hear Daily Mail readers nodding along while the rest of us are gratified that the sociopathy is laid bare. The cameras point of view in this is strikingly neutral.

Playing Churchill is a green light for self-indulgent hamming for any actor tbf.

Yeah by all accounts Churchill himself spent most of his life "playing Churchill." And he was a consummate ham in the role.

(Insert corny and trite ruminations on "aren't we all just playing the part of ourselves on this great stage of life" etc.)

yes -- and i think it's a bit deeper even than this, as well, bcz the ones who say "let's party and fuck" (who are totally the ones who make sense, even more in the 60s than the 50s, are also the ones where it's obvious that they're doing nothing to justify the colossal privilege: elizabeth's determination is a double one, to prove she can be a satisfactory monarch even though she's a young girl with a very odd and inadequate education (except in the constitution), one that can match up to her dad, and victoria and the other semi-mythical elizabeth, but also to justify the privilege by an iron committment to a selfless version of the duty she owes and the role she must commit to (the dowdiness is an expression of this, like the other elizabeth's quasi-holy virginity)

^^^which is a bonkers insupportable topsyturvy view, but without it, there's just nothing left to ground the wealth and the palaces, etc, as any kind of equitable settlement -- and that's where elizabeth is coming from

re the constitution: she refers to bagehot* when he comes into conversation as "badgett", but her teacher -- a professor with a northern accent, who drinks -- calls him "batshit"... which is not IMO an accident

*(walter bagehot, the 19th centry theorist of the constitution and apologist for the victorian monarchy)

― mark s, Thursday, November 17, 2016 6:49 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^mark s ("otm itt" ― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl)) correctly calling eiir's underbusing of andrew 3 yrs later imo

that guardian article is pretty lame. spretending to be some kind of deep dive into the Crown when it’s mosly generalised waffling and “down with that sort of thing” concern-trolling about...aristocracy period dramas as a whole?

plus we’re pingponging from darkest hour to the favourite to the crown to downton AND to dunkirk?

pick a lane, jesus

Finished S3

Final episode v moving, I do love the way they have written the sisterly aspects of the Queen & Margaret

It's going to be very strange for people when Charles Dance gets blown up at the start of next season and they have no idea why because Northern Ireland has not been mentioned once so far.

maybe they'll introduce some heart of gold, but initially uncompromising Irish nationalist character (like the Welsh nationalist tutor to Charles) who learns to respect these parasitic nazis for what is inside them, rather than for what an absolute horror show they actually are. To make it less awkward when you see Dance/Mountbatten's earthly remains gloriously spraying all over the shop!

Or does that actually make it more awkward? I've not really thought this post through tbh!

yeah there’s def some holes that will need filling in before Dicky’s curtain call.

It must be such a hard show to write, as far as balancing actual history & fictional personal lives & how much history to give & when to deploy what etc.
i heard instead on 1 researcher they have a team of like 4 or 5. Plus the editing process apparently is very bloodthirtsy. Lots on the cutting room floor.

oh and idk if anyone cares but Princess Margaret was on an ep of Desert Island Discs back in the mid 80’s

https://youtu.be/Bi9FtwbU7m0

(i havent listened yet tho)

I hope they have someone tell the popular joke of the time, "Q: How do we know Mountbatten had dandruff? A: They found his Head & Shoulders washed up on the shore".

To be fair to them, I am learning loads about twentieth-century British history from the snippets presented in The Crine. I guess they only present the parts of history that affect the royals directly, which The Troubles probably did not until Mountbatten was killed.

No Royal Family, no Troubles. Discuss.

Cromwell might have something to say about this^

take away that bauble

Find it weird that every other US prez has had a spin on this series, but no one did Nixon. They even had the chance to do it with the hidden-away doco!

The whole Princess Alice story was fascinating to me, I knew nothing about her.

The Princess Margaret episode Desert Island Discs is recapped amusingly in Craig Brown's sort of biography Ma'am Darling. It was a bit of a PR disaster at the time iirc

The book itself is very good and an excellent insight into what a selfish monster she was

Agreed. There was a lot I didn't like about the book (basically I thought the fictionalized elements were bad), but it had a lot of excellent stories about her being completely dreadful. It was also interesting to read about how badly former staff members were treated.

Yeah the fictional elements are skippable (it's glaringly obvious he's straining against the conceit) but I can't imagine anyone who's into this show wouldn't get value out of it

Very true. People would be into it.

It sounds like that new book by Lady Glenconner would be right up Crine fans' streets too. I saw her on Graham Norton, and the stories she tells are A+ royal family craziness.

only caught a couple of episodes of this but it plays a bit fast and loose with historical accuracy. just off the top of my head: to his credit the notorious pederast lord mountbatten didn't consider the coup plot, he rejected it immediately; there's no reason to think that harold wilson knew he had alzheimers when he stepped down as pm, he tried to embark on a media career immediately following his resignation

I learned this the last time I looked up everybody on the show on Wikipedia but Lady Glenconner’s brother-in-law was Alexander Cockburn???

cockburn was married to emma tennant, who is LG's sister i guess?

their daughter was daisy cockburn, and i just found this good quote from her abt her dad: he "loved cobwebs because he thought they were romantic. So she hasn't dusted since he died"

this is my reason also

I don’t dust cobwebs because my cat likes to eat them.

ok i'm going in

i was uneager before what with events but now i'm gung-ho

iirc the Aberfan section is very good but the series is overall pretty meh. I'm not sure about the guy who plays Wilson (some of dialogue with him is good but also mainly terrible) but saying that I've read about 100 pages of the Pimlett biography on him since i watched this and maybe they've done an alright job tbf!

i love Jason Watkins in everything so i was onboard but admittedly i didnt know a ton about Wilson

it opens in sprightly fashion: a flunky realising he has to describe the queen as old to her face (bcz of the new stamp design), helena b-c hilarious as margaret, eiir discussing wilson and communism with anthony blunt (a bit stolen from from a p good play by alan bennett) -- and i'm only 11 mins in

wilson a hard figure to capture and represent i suspect, they just called him "enigmatic", which is correct -- h's become a bit of a strange hole in political histories of the era he dominated (and wrote about, tho i doubt anyone except pimlott ever read what he wrote)

lol at herself sucking up to winnie and he just drops off as she's blathering

"after that it's ma-am -- rhymes with ham"

some of the most contested bad Wilson dialogue from this was him confessing he has Alzheimer's iirc - which wouldn't make sense with the time it was. In his formative years at Oxford he wasn't impressed with poshboy commies like phillip toynbee and initially joined the liberal party (while they were extremely unfashionable and of the verge of extinction) so the bit where it is said the secret services vetted him and he checked out ok would be very true!

iirc he was very aware his mental powers were in decline -- he'd had a formidable memory, and felt it slipping away and decided to quit before it got so bad that it caused him problems

yeah him and his dad both had astonishing powers of memorising and his dad was a human calculator. If he had it at that stage then i'm totally fucked!

it's probably quite a good performance by Watkins tbf

This show drags so much. I’ve been putting it on as background while working and thought I was well into season 2. Nope, episode 7 of season 1.

think the word "mole" is probably more anachronistic than "alzheimer's" actually -- the latter was named as condition in like 1910, though wasn't in wide public usage i think until the mid-80s? (they;d have said "pre-senile dementia" probably)

"mole" went wide in 1974 w/tinker tailor and was presumably a term of art in the secret services before then but the head of mi5 wouldn't just use it unglossed to HMQ in 1965

(i will try and not do this too much, it is a pathology and renders endeavour unwatchable for me)

don't mention moles to HMQ, she'll be getting her gloves on to wring the neck of some poor creature! (obv baseball bat delivered death is purely for commoners)

ok i was getting mildly annoyed at the extensive use e1 had made of a.bennett's "a question of attribution" -- but actually they turned it round nicely and added something (at phil's expense lol)

i like the pace tbh

The theme of the ones I saw in this last series seemed to be how trapped they all were and how we should feel sorry for them (Charles, Phil, Margaret) which was all a bit overdone. Lots of gloomy music as well. Very tedious.

no spoilers

... there's the rub, I have no interest in watching even a millisecond of anything that tries to make you feel sympathy for anyone connected with the Windsors. You will probably not be surprised to learn

ok but cf my reading and counterclaim throughout the thread (viz slapping down tuomas two years ago): it's about eiir's solitude, which/who you only need feel sorry about/for if you feel her decision to accede to the institution is justified or undodgeable (if you think duty is a call that honour can't refuse). i continue to think this is an interesting stipulation for the central character of a modern story, bcz so very unusual and untimely -- and bcz it's classically so clearly the set-up for a tragedy rather than a happy ending, which is (to me) an interesting way to set off into this allegedly pro-monarchy story (as in: anything more hostile or satirical, more superficially anti-monarchy, will be unavoidably much less interesting, not least bcz so much more commonplace as a dramatic choice)

we shall see and i shall say if s3 (as fetter is claiming) swerves wildly in a new direction. as of e1 it very much does not (so philip seems to have become poisonously dislikeable and eiir unfoyishly overeager to slip into fatuous upperclass rumour all round her -- viz that wilson is obviously a communist spy)

Famously EIIR liked Wilson.

she likes him in this show

american stuff honestly continues to be the weakest material (everyone seems to doing bad fake accents)

It's the stuff they choose to leave out that annoys me. Princess Anne is by far the most interesting character but they didn't show her kidnap attempt.

as of e2 it's mostly abt duty vs "let's party and fuck" -- assuming the side currently losing (=duty) will shortly pull something out of its dowdy hat to save the geopolitical day

lol i was wrong and good twist (e2 still): not only is the takeaway that the crown as a institution is fucked up and creates monsters but they actually put more or less these exact words into the mouth of tommy lascelles viz its shrewdest and most pitilessly loyal proponent stroke servant

oof the aberfan ep hit me from a totally unexpectedly angle: i mean i know abt it, i've watched documentaries abt it etc (50th anniversary was 2016). i was 6 when it happened and a schoolchild myself presumably literally at school that day -- in other words in a building of much the same (victorian redbrick) look and in a room of much the same (wooden floors) look and feel (tho infant rather than junior, our junior school was a modern building 10 minutes walk away), and in a rural farming village not a mining village of course.

we didn't get a telly till i was 7 and i don't remember knowing abt it at the time, or at all having to process it as a child (i think i first read abt it and saw pictures in a very up-to-date school historybook when i was abt 12?)

anyway i wasn't expecting to be thinking abt it all from the angle of finding the room they were so familiar and honestly cosy, just before they all die so horribly (i loved my time at that school)

blimey :(

jason watkins can't really do wilson's accent -- which i feel i know better than my mum and dad's, that rolling impish granular grumble (amplified by mike yarwood of course, who actually could do it, even if he was otherwise the least funny man alive)

He's got to be better than John Sessions' attempt in "Made In Dagenham". Sessions, who ended up playing Ted Heath not longer afterwards! I'll bet he was crap at that too.

It makes me feel very old that when I was a kid John "UKIP supporter" Sessions was an up and coming young talent in Porterhouse Blue playing a student!

Turns out he never had much talent after all.

yeah, it seemed pretty evident at the time!

he popped up in a James Bond radio adaptation over Christmas - so much for cancellation culture!

who is the poshest "working class" pol between Heath, Thatcher and Wilson? Thatcher was insulated more successfully from the depression than Wilson was but Wilson still still had posher holidays.

watching marcia williams shouting at him just reminded me that private eye always called him "wislon" after some stupid typo that amused them immensely

ok lol at wilson giving HMQ a masterclass in the political need for fake authenticity and actress olivia c then delivering the character's first ever acted tear -- oc's command of her own tear ducts the deeper and spookier masterclass here, that wobbling little blob of water subtly welling for a literal age on her lower lid

(i mean possibly this is faked in production but i prefer to believe the extremely professional colman said "do you want it nice and normal and quick or just unbelievably super-slow, i can do either?")

We’re up to Aberfan too. Oof. I remember my parents talking about it when I was small - it was only nine years before I was born and I realised it was as close to me as the London bombings were to my son. Feelings on top of feelings. OC’s tear was amazing but HM’s eyes IRL are so very cornflower blue, that scene in particular was a bit wonky for me.

the "royals invent reality TV" ep is p funny -- was alice of battenberg genuinely drifting around like a lazy sit-com plot point?

(not feeling their versions of barbara castle or tony benn)

The stuff with Phil's Mum was really eye opening for me, what a life she had.

likewise! battenberg is just a nasty ugly cake to me!

After Princess Alice left the asylum at long last, she lived a nomadic existence, wandering Europe in disguise and eschewing contact with her family for years. As she traveled through Europe, her daughters married German men enmeshed with the Nazi cause. It wasn’t until 1937 that she resumed contact with her family, and it wasn’t until 1938 that she saw her husband for the first time in six years at the funeral of her daughter Cecilie, who died in a plane crash along with her husband and children.

In 1938, Princess Alice returned to Athens, where she rented a modest two-bedroom apartment and continued her work with the poor and underprivileged. She worked with the Red Cross, organized soup kitchens for starving Athenians, and smuggled medical supplies into Greece from Sweden. In 1943, she sheltered a Jewish widow and her two children, hiding them in her home and pleading not to understand Gestapo questioning on account of her deafness.

She obviously must have been adopted, or perhaps getting institutionalised and living with a disability in much more unenlightened times put her on the path to being a genuine enigma and a confirmed good one in a family of complete fucking arseholes!

I was forced by family to watch an episode in November... the "bust up Chas & Camilla" one. This family is so much on my mind, I had to ask, "They're married now, right?"

The Crown podcast covers s3 w really great insightful interviews w cast & crew - i highly recommend the ep4 interview w Jane Lapotaire, the actress who played Alice: she is equally fascinating & has a v intense connection to Alice

https://thecrowntheofficialpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes

xpost - yep!!

they knew :)

oh sry, i misread your post! oops :D

I still prefer that woman who played QEII in the Rutles film and The Naked Gun

the show def makes the Harry & Megan kerfuffle ~slightly~more interesting to me in the context of duty, etc & how oppressive it is etc - like, fuck yes! run for yr freedom! bc this whole poisonous Deal will fuck you up for life if it hasnt already.

but also if the Queen Mum was still alive she’d have prob popped her clogs over it

the naked gun actress is jeanette charles -- a very routine stand-in on UK TV

she has a good origin story: she "appeared as an actress in repertory theatre in her twenties, but initially had difficulty obtaining Equity membership due to her resemblance to the Queen"

still-alive queen mother is now 120 years old, she shd make a rap record like jean calment did

jeanne calment i mean

https://archive.robertianhawdon.me.uk/sites/www.stevedonald.com/img/qmama.jpg

i watched* the documentary, i'm assuming when it first showed in 1969 and i was 9. i remember just one thing: prince charles practicing the cello, bcz a string breaks as he plays -- which is a small shock to everyone (wikipedia says it breaks in prince edward's face, but i don't recall that bit even tho it sounds funny). he must have been aged 20 or so tho i picture him much younger. they agreed to make it as part of a bid to get a payrise but response was scathing enough that it hasn't been shown publicly since 1972, and naturally even academic researchers have to pay the crown estate £35 to watch it. i suspect they also got the pay rise sooner rather than later.

*tbf there's a good chance i was actually only half-watching and reading a book at the same time, same as when i watched the 1966 world cup lol

Princess Margaret was awful in real life, wasn't she? Currently the only character I don't want to see guillotined.

naughty and bored and spoiled and incurious, "modern" fsvo, not a sanctimonious bore and not entirely dim, i think in the 60s and 70s she could be a refreshing party encounter for a royal when she decided to be charming or to dispense with protocol -- but if "real life" has any meaning in this context i don't think she was bothered about likeable or personable or considerate

(this series blames liz for this)

mistake crossing the streams and casting a lannister

maybe it wasn't -- as a result of being tywin he has a kind of glinting weight which maybe grants harmsworth's proposal more sinister weight than it actually ever had (the threat needs to be real for "mild peril" purposes)

I'm currently reading Craig Brown's Ma'am Darling, which basically backs what mark s surmises above about Margaret - except that she was a stickler for protocol at all times, even with close friends. Brown's portrait is more convincing and rounded than Anne Glenconner's attempt at rehabiliating Margaret in her recent Lady In Waiting memoir (although it's still a rip-roaring read; I gorged on every detail).

the "charles learning welsh" section is superbly excruciating :|

omg her hat!

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/774/lime-cat.jpg

also this has made me want to restart welsh on duolingo so i'm not caught out at my investiture

i loved that episode

charles is such a woebegone figure, esp. as mummy powers on towards her third century ever tinier and more ruthlessly compact

yeah woebegone is exactly the word for it

meanwhile phil wishes he was landing on the moon

liz-hat-watch:

https://statici.behindthevoiceactors.com/behindthevoiceactors/_img/chars/mojo-jojo-teen-titans-go-7.54.jpg

everyone is thinking abt or actually having sex in this ep -- except edward heath (played by an actor i once talked to face to face at a screening, plumper now, as am i) and the duke of windsor, who is dying instead

nicely poisonous way for the nazi to go out, handing over the letters -- they really are trained in focus and the long game, these battenbergs

saxe-coburg-gothas i mean lol, battenberg is a kind of cake

not all the accents are nailed -- ted heath is less cop than wilson's even -- which possibly shouldn't matter, it's not an impressionists' convention, except it's put in the spotlight by the deft cartoon fun colman, menzies and o'connor are having with eiir's, pp's and pc's voices (colman especially is working those clipped i's)

lia williams made up like a walking mummy

scargill klaxon

*corgis shriek at heath as he enters*
HRH: "i'm sorry prime minister they mean no harm"
TH: "all animals mean harm!"

i love the thing colman does when she carries a polite smile one deathly beat too long, to mean (but never say) "what the living feck??!!" -- it's as if she can drain all joy from her face without moving a muscle

yes! i love that too, she’s great with those expressions that say volumes

heath: "we'll make no progress if you concentrate only on our differences"
scargill:"no! you're wrong, that's the ONLY way we'll make progress -- until you recognise the miners' contribution to this country is what keeps the lights on in schools, factories, hospitals -- and grand rooms like these -- there can be no agreements made with the NUM!"

scargill otm lol

(another accent not really nailed sadly)

omg what a parcel of cowardly nitwits!

during a powercut is a nice touch

privilege-watch: maybe bcz we lived in the country and it was easy to gather wood for the fire and (as a war-baby) mum tended to stockpile candles anyway lol, my family LOVED the powercuts during the miners' strike -- they were more an adventure than any kind of hardship

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2019-11/18/20/asset/a1cf3a2933a9/sub-buzz-10961-1574110659-1.jpg
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2019-11/18/20/asset/da7d6985f8c8/sub-buzz-2113-1574110673-1.jpg
https://stat✧✧✧.a✧✧.es/media/cultura/2018/03/09/dracula-krdE--620x✧✧✧@a✧✧.j✧✧

:0

https://i.imgflip.com/1sqsoa.jpg

(it's geraldine chaplin not lia williams)

(sorry i kind of effed up my wallis simpson content at every stage here: tho since she functions in THE CROWN as the ghoul who fucks it all up for everyone, this seems appropriate)

I've also just read Craig Brown's Ma'am Darling, and found it initially good fun, but it palls rather over 400+ pages. I suppose it depends on your appetite for that late C20 royal/literary/showbiz gossipy biography (Mitfords, Waughs, Tynan, all that lot); mine is not as strong as it was.

lol something i'd completely forgotten is that when christopher hitchens reviewed philip zeigler's official biography on edward viii in the LRB, the review had the title how's the vampire? (a cheeky revsion of george v's suppposed dying words -- "how's the empire?" -- as if in reference to wallis simpson). this may well have been swimming around in my subconscious last night! tho it looks as if the makers of THE CROWN got there also…

the joke's half at the expense of ruling class misogyny -- tho in this context CH can't quite help showing us glimpses of his own (the same problem often bubbled up when he wrote abt di). but other than this it's a goodish analysis, of the exact extent of eviii's fascism and what a mess it makes at least of the vulgar version of the constitutional role of the crown and its checks and balances (of the zeigler book CH says it lays out the evidence with admirable clraity but declines to draw the correct conclusions.
it's a goodish essay:
. that was actually titled ( is making a joke abt )

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n21/christopher-hitchens/how-s-the-vampire) (may need sub). this was 1990, back when hitchens could (a) still write and (b) still had reasonably principled politics --

lol the malign influence is still at work!

final sentences as intended: it's a goodish essay (may need sub). this was 1990, back when hitchens could (a) still write well and (b) still had reasonably principled politics. if anything you can feed all this into THE CROWN's version of the constitutional role blah blah to highlight how remarkable they're making eiir out to be, for successfully resisting her uncle's tendencies -- as of s3 anyway -- and for for ruining the inner life of her family and her sister's and children's possible happiness in pursuit of this

(prescient sideswipe mention of trump also)

lol just spent ten mins rewinding and replaying to see if helena BC is actually playing the piano -- if she *is* she's OK pub-pianist boogiewoogie level tho i *suspect* it's a dummy keyboard and someone else is suppyling the sounds as she sings along and silently but with good rhythm-sense bashes chord-like shapes (by my eye she's not actually doing the left hand stridework we're hearing, but my eye might be wrong)

additional discussion: https://www.fanpop.com/clubs/helena-bonham-carter/picks/results/32197/can-helena-bonham-carter-play-piano

no way to know i guess what pub-level princess margaret was

Noel Coward's verdict: "Surprisingly good, she has an impeccable ear, her piano playing is simple but has perfect rhythm and her method of singing is really very funny."

tbf she had a lot of spare time in which to practice

maybe but she doesn't seem the type to spend her spare time doing something so ungratifying in the short term! but i guess we know some of her relatives put a lot of practice work into things that are physically tricky (like show jumping) (and polo i guess!), so the right kinds of habit of self-discipline are there in the family round her

i'm less surprised when royals are good comic performers -- it's an extension of their actual jobs in a way, putting normies (and statesmen) their at ease. but "impeccable ear" is high (and interesting) praise!

Isn't it the sort of thing you'd say if you were hoping to suck up to Princess Margaret, though?

then you'd say "unsurprisingly good" !

(i assumed this was in some diary not for her eyes or similar, if it was to her face then it's obviously much less interesting and reliable, yes)

It was a diary entry, yeah

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2019 season is nominated in the 2019 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2019 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends January 31

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (4 minimum, 25 maximum, organized by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail by end of day today. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

Rumour reached me that Shirley Temple even invited the fool to preach at Windsor Chapel. Can you imagine the banality of those exchanges? The Smugness, self-congratulation and hypocrisy. What a grotesque occasion that must have been.

Edward VIII would have made a cracking ilxer!

I'm psyched for the class masochism of watching series 4 tbh

Season 4 starts this Sunday 😃😃😃
*insert corgi barking*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiXEpminPms

If there isn't an entire episode recreating It's A Royal Knockout in Larry Sanders onscreen/bts style, no sale.

lol

fyi USA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97ZMC8cV3to

warning: it cannot be unseen

Season 4 now up ie WE HAVE CORGI SIGN

it peaks in the first ep this season (Dickie gets a pressie from the RA and his head gets launched into the stratosphere). And this sub-plot of 29 year old Charles grooming a schoolgirl looks a bit of a dead-end!

I fell sleep during ep 2. Too much Charles is a big turn off. Although I lolled at Dennis Thatcher.

I'm going to watch another ep later because I want see who plays Willie Whitelaw!

calzino otm, I was expecting them to save dickie’s fate for at least a little later!

Charles Dance must’ve been costing a fortune or something

they should be more judicious with their timelining, they've completely bypassed punk and killed off one of the top actors in it. When G.O.T. killed off too many of the better actors it soon turned into unwatchable shite!

although to hell with the late 70's tbh

making the Thatchers into drab but sympathetically unpretentious characters, whilst getting sucked into the Balmoral freakshow was fun but problematic. Because we all know Thatcher was satan!

there is an appealing comical sort of chemistry between Anderson and the actor who plays Denis, but it annoys me because I end up feeling the need for self-flagellation for liking fictional versions of evil and bad people!

I’m 2 eps in and like it so far, Scully’s Thatcher is a bit .. distracting? it all feels a bit much idk thatcher never seemed much like an actual person irl though anyway and still doesnt here, honestly fine keeping it that way

Dennis is v lol

got a perverse glee from Margaret telling off Thatcher for sitting in Queen Vicky’s chair lol

Young Diana is quite uncanny at times

Denis T always seemed a bit like bit of a comic suburban caricature irl

lol at that angry class warrior M Thatcher, pwning the Queen by quoting chartist poetry!

Scriptwriters better have included the Lord Mountbatten shampoo joke or gtf.

I loved the sequence in S3 where he is butthurt after the Labour govt sacks him as chief of defence and he is getting embroiled in the military coup plot against Wilson and the Queen tells him to sit the fuck down, perhaps it was best he got his dandruff sorted - his character was becoming a bit stale!

i loved it when the Queen tells off old toffs, it’s always v good, Dickie no exception

Camilla v Diana lunch is very much my shit

making the Thatchers into drab but sympathetically unpretentious characters,

Strongly disagree on the idea that they are sympathetic. I think GA is coming across as completely unhinged, which is as it should be. During the Balmoral visit, I definitely hated all sides equally. I was a bit disappointed with how heavy-handedly they played compare and contrast between the Thatchers' visit and Diana's. Yes, yes, we get it. Although I did like the little detail of her telling Phil that she loves the country and then telling Camilla that she hates it.

yes that was v good

Tickled by what a piece of shit Mark Thatcher is

nose to tail

Andrew & Edward:

HEY GUYS WE’RE FINALLY IN IT
...
oh. huh.
WAIT THAT wasn’t—-ok nvm

i dont know if the “Edward was gifted a chilled bottle of white wine/piss by his classmates ” is true but the idea of it really gave me a happiness i never knew existed

Richard Roxburgh as Bob Hawke!
I’ll drink to that lovely bit of casting

was hoping for Ginger Spice as Fergie.

The flying paedo or piss-boy - choose your fighter!

the too on the nose to be true segment with Diane/Camilla going for a meal together at a restaurant called Ménage à Trois is actually 100% true - believe it or not.

It was really popular with Sloanes of a certain type because iirc it only served starters and puddings!

just absolutely ideal for people with eating disorders obv!

Between Diana moping about the place and Margaret's days stretching out like an empty void, you wonder why nobody in the royal family can read a book.

going in on this tonight STOKED FOR THE MAJNESS

tbh I thought the best ep in ages was the one about Fagan the palace intruder.

going in on this tonight STOKED FOR THE MAJNESS

Me too. Hoping for a corgi orgy

watching a couple of eps of ANCIENT ALIENS in studious preparation

xxpost yeah the Fagan episode was really good! and quite moving

also it contains on my fave kind of job-centre nostalgia, looking back to the days when you could still be a rude wiseacre to job centre staff without getting sanctioned!

only through episode 5 so far, but Scully as Thatcher is brutal, IMO.

Looking forward to Mountbatten getting blown up.

― Terry Micawber (Tom D.), Friday, 27 October 2017 11:45 (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I hope they have someone tell the popular joke of the time, "Q: How do we know Mountbatten had dandruff? A: They found his Head & Shoulders washed up on the shore".

― 'Skills' Wallace (Tom D.), Monday, 25 November 2019 07:46 (eleven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Scriptwriters better have included the Lord Mountbatten shampoo joke or gtf.

― Boring blighters bloaters (Tom D.), Monday, 16 November 2020 00:28 (sixteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

:D

Only one episode in so far, but holy shit. While I've known, at least on a surface level, almost all of the historical events that have popped up in this show, I genuinely had no idea about Mountbatten's demise AT ALL. So that was genuinely shocking and not what I expected from the first episode.

In my defense I'm American and I hadn't yet turned three when he was assassinated.

first ep: early scene (backdrop = an ira speech intensifying the bloodshed) all the main characters in uniform as literal wizened puppet-monsters

enter scully's hair

Lord Mountbatten had a boat
Ee i ee i o

https://s30886.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/9-22.jpg

this was the puppet i was put in mind of (not stupid spitting image garbage, fuck that)

my wife watches this so I caught a wee bit last night. thatcher being a class warrior at balmoral and in her cabinet shuffle: this all seems very ahistorical and wrong. thatcher, like heath, obviously petit-bourgeois, and this was a change for the tories who always had an inbred toff patrician at their helm before this period, but I don't really ever remember hearing anything about thatcher railing against the aristos, though I'm sure Dennis made an arsenal of himself in front of the royals

yeah when she was quoting chartist poetry at the Queen I was lolling. This represents a calming in me because a few years back I'd have been swearing and yelling blue murder at the tv.

Instead of some 19 year old squaddie from Castlemilk or some some guy on his way home from painting a fence at a British Army base, this was a rare instance of the IRA blowing up the right people

phil with enaged bared teeth in every scene now, charles turning into a woebegone goblin sculpted from a collapsing rotten pumpkin

enraged tho engaged also works

my wife watches this so I caught a wee bit last night. thatcher being a class warrior at balmoral and in her cabinet shuffle: this all seems very ahistorical and wrong. thatcher, like heath, obviously petit-bourgeois, and this was a change for the tories who always had an inbred toff patrician at their helm before this period, but I don't really ever remember hearing anything about thatcher railing against the aristos, though I'm sure Dennis made an arsenal of himself in front of the royals

Now look here, this revisionist take on Thatcher has already given rise to several Oscar/BAFTA winning performances, so it must be true.

it would have been news to Viscount "Everybody PM needs a Willie" Whitelaw that Thatcher's first cabinet bloodbath of wets was class warfare!

don't know if it has any historical sanction at all but i'm enjoying margaret's instant appalled dislike of -- and targeting of -- thatch, presumably partly to wind up her big sister

she digs up some interesting skeletons in the family closet in ep 7, which was quite unexpected.

if there was any doubt that the Queen Mother isn't Hitler, it all gets sorted in ep 7.

turns out the poem abt it being good to have enemies is indeed one she liked -- apparrently this was mentioned in a bbc dcumentary a while back? -- and that the poet, charles mackay, was indeed a chartist!

(i highly doubt she quoted it at the queen or that she wd have glossed him as a chartist as well as a poem)

also discovered while factcheck-googling: samuel smiles, who she was often compared to (i re his version of victorian values) was also a chartist at one point

as well as a poet, i mean

I stopped last season right before Philip's mother comes on the scene and it kind of seems like she'd make a better biopic subject than her kid or daughter-in-law.

her episodes were my favorites of s3, really beautiful & poignant

Diana Fashion sidebar - good thread showing side by sides of some of the excellent wardrobe recreations (lol at one hilar typo: gingham mispelled/autocorrected as gangam)

So I took the time to match some of the outfits inspired by Princess Diana that The Crown recreated (a thread).

Starting with the yellow overalls.

Also, please give that department all of the awards it deserves. #TheCrown #TheCrownSeason4 #TheCrownNetflix pic.twitter.com/9R49jqu7fH

— Simona (@simona_ka) November 17, 2020

lol the CROWN version of the visible outfit is like a PLAYSCHOOL presenter just abt to introduce charlws to big ted and little ted

I can remember wearing dungarees in the 80's. But of course I wanted to look like oor wullie!

Lots of tories have been moaning this show is so beastly to thatch. One of the BBC Royal correspondents was moaning it was beastly to the Saxe Coburgs. You just can't win in this game!

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YNU-12joiVk/WwO27g5dOAI/AAAAAAAAHV4/kuFQh-E9Q6gzhiGPj1OWT5jCbchUjgQsgCLcBGAs/s1600/FB_IMG_1447965984555.jpg

very much loving the far-right freak-out at the (it says here) insulting and inaccurate portrayal of thatch lol: good! cry more u contemptible fvcks

even tho i also think this rendering of thatch is very much out of key with the project and not actually particularly good except as a weird impressionist's sore-thumb stunt-turn for GA

A: bcz MT's dialogue is all tell-not-show text-not-subtext in a way that no one else's is
B: the reading of the early thatcherite project as the final clear-out of a specific narrow upperclass layer (one-nation poshos aka wets) is not wrong!
BUT
i: i doubt MT wd have conflated this layer with the royal family (very different layer, interconnected but different political role)
ii: she wd never have expressed it with such e.p.thompsonite clarity lol (she didn't have a marxist self-analysis of her "alderman's" perspective)
iii: she is known to have been somewhat dramatically obsequious to eiir, this is just chilly plastic performance of that as fakery
iv: which (as of e2) magnifies super-rude margo as the extremely unlikely hero of the piece lol (i mean i enjoyed this but it's bullshit)
C: there is indeed an extreme formal clash between herself's reading of the needful politics in divided times (a unified people! through the monarch's performance and intercession!) and MT's (it's time to go to war on the enemy within)
D: use the "enemies" poem out loud by all means, to dramatise C -- it absolutely states MT's approach to politics and nullifies eiir's (eiir's in this reading blah blah) -- but don't have her announce let alone justify her attraction to it by saying mackay was a chartist (even oddly enuf tho he was)

way way way upthread i was arguing w/tuomas abt why it's good not bad that this show hasn't - as part of its explicative structure -- appointed a figure who stands for our modern critique of the monarchy as an institution. well tbh i think it just did appoint one -- turns out it was thatch all along.

and i was right (and tuomas was wrong lol): this move immediately massively sentimentalises both sides (which is to say distorts them). the point of the project so far has been to explore what it was like inside the disorted reality field, what the values are that enable the distortion, what the distortion turns you into. the idea that maggie and di between them signal with their simultaneous arrival the beginning of the quiet wreckage of eiir's doggedly dutiful conception of her role* is shrewd enough -- and as ever the writing is good at creating seemingly balanced effects while subtly tweaking them in unexpected directions (di's seeming acceptance of the world she's entering and its acceptance of her being the SPOILER ticking time bomb lol)** -- ………

BUT they don't find a way for magz to express her underlying possibly even unconscious role (as achieved via the unfettering of the city, the banks, let management manage etc -- her known intent -- and the shattering of all institutions and movements that stood to contain these forces) except as a bluntly out-out marvel-villain personalised statement of intentions, and a highly anachronistic war on "privilege" that likely existed only as pullulating unexpressed baffled resentment as she actually confronted it when at balmoral

*i'm guessing (as of e2) that this is how s4 as a whole unfolds
**also im imagine di is the spirit of margo's revenge on her sister for decisions made in s1-3

"out-out" = "out-loud" tho works as is also

It's all building towards the 1:48 ep where the issue of sanctions against SA and Magz disdain for these "beastly savages in funny headwear" that is the commonwealth makes her and Bess political enemies ready to go one on one - no blades! Lots of artistic licence taken no doubt, after the excellent Fagan ep and the also moving hereditary one, it felt like a damp squib to me.

a weird impressionist's sore-thumb stunt-turn for GA

Thatcher was a weird impressionist's sore-thumb stunt-turn though.

starting e3 tonight i guess (i have always doubted it could arrive at the recognisable present w/o coming to pieces a bit)

(i don't have high hopes of the project in the medium term, i think it's bitten off more than it's likely to be able to chew, but so far i've been surprised and impressed)

― mark s, Thursday, 15 December 2016 17:14 (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

incidentally i am tending to read anything peter morgan is quoted as saying as more a sly masking of what he's up to than any kind of reliable or open admission

this sudden rage from the downton-unbothered set isn't bcz of PM's belated leftie heel-turn, it's bcz ppl hasn't been watching remotely carefully since the outset: the smash of forces was always ready immanent from the outset sorry if this offends

xp yes which creates a "behind the mask" issue which neither script nor GA's performance solve in themselves, as well as (only semi-related) a clash of dramatic schools or approaches, which undermine one another

how do you solve a problem like thatchia

I'm three episodes from finishing Season 2 and hope to see y'all in a couple days.

actually come to think of it the behind-the-mask issue is presumably why ALL the portrayals of the various prime ministers have seemed slightly off: successful politician = successful at wearing a mask (to paper over divisions)! but we only get see behind eiir's mask and the other mask-worlds just flash by w/o deep (or any) exploration of similar contradictions

My fave two fictional pms on this have been the two Harolds. And Supermac as a domestic doormat and a cuck was good entertainment.

Churchill was the usual dross.

churchill is simply unplayable now i suspect but choosing a US actor for the role wasn't a terrible idea -- establishes "mask" upfront w/o having to do a lifetime's work giving it backstory -- and it was also fun seeing him repeatedly bested by the child-queen as his mind went lol

tbf it wasn't half as bad as the Oldman vanity project in a Churchill mask, but that is a low bar!

also i liked that the crux of the fog ep was him being horny for his (invented) young secretary who died

lol that was a bit twisted!

some of invented sec's dialogue in that ep was almost as risible as Oldman's Churchill giving a speech on the tube in that very very bad movie!

churchill is simply unplayable now i suspect but choosing a US actor for the role wasn't a terrible idea -- establishes "mask" upfront w/o having to do a lifetime's work giving it backstory

otm -- and Lithgow played FDR in a 1994 TV film lol

i have not watched the oldman-as-old-ma film tbftm ("on the tube" made me think of muriel grey angrily grilling him)

I would love to see Patrick Stewart doing Churchill just because of how terrible and funny it would be!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sikpgjoKVQ

There should be moratorium on Churchill being portrayed on film and television for at least a decade, but I can't blame actors for loving to win awards without having to do much actual acting.

I love that scene when pathetic brat Charles says: I need to talk to you mummy. And she retorts: If this is going to be about your marriage, then stand on your feet like it is the privy council, so we can at least keep it brief.

lol, respect!

4 episodes in and still irritated by how much time characters spend in piss-poorly lit rooms than anything else

I like Rod Taylor (Australian) playing Churchill as a horrible old man in Inglorious Basterds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Azs_6uaCA

Oh my god, morto for Diana over the anniversary present. Horrendous.

lol her horrible flat-mates toasting the engagement: "and to one day, not too far away, BEING THE FUCKING QUEEN"

let me wack yalls on the noodle with this giant mace-shaped DRAMATIC IRONY

Yeah, only three episodes in and the heavy-handed HERE IS FORESHADOWING DO YOU SEE???? with the paparazzi and being followed in the car and everything is just getting to be way too much.

i mean tbf not sure how you could do it any other way, that element was always already way too much, we knew that instantly

herself living to be 10,000 yrs old tho, this was not known 40 yrs ago

I mean, sure, but it seems a little ott so far. I much preferred the scenes with her reckoning with the sudden change in her life. Love the scene of her roller skating and the shot of her slouched in the chair, dejectedly watching the kids show.

that mere kids show is the iconic Bagpuss!

charles being played as a wizened pervy beast thinking only of himself (accurate)

Lol one of the undeniable accuries played out in this show

margo: "charles. loves. someone. else. how many times can this family make the same mistake?"

luv too be right abt this dumm (grebt) show have invested so much anaylitical bravura in

she's lit to look like the bride of frankenstein as she says it

meanwhile the queen mum is barking like a gauleiter

so now that I've finished Season Two, I did a frantic ctrl-f in this thread to find "Matthew Goode hawt" and, well, imagine my disappointment.

The meet-cute in the museum b/w Anthony and Margaret is the best written and acted I've seen so far. Goode barely moves or opens his mouth (except to exhale cig smoke) and is riveting.

Too bad he's not in Season Three.

lol MT decribing her children: "twins, mark and carol, 28 years old -- and my favourite, mark, a very special child, the kind of son any mother would dream of having" etc

it goes into total on-the-nose we-don't-do-subtext-mate frenzy every time thatch is on-screen

omg I loved Goode as young Lord Snowdon, he’s SO good. Grown Lord Snowdon played by Ben Daniels in s3 isnt half bad either! i think you will be pleased

(xpost to Alfred)

the older Snowden by Daniels is probably closer to what he really was like i.e. not very enigmatic nor artistic, just a grumpy old posh twat with a camera and a negligible quota of talent!

idk i thought his photography skills were widely acknowledged? or are we just casting gimlet eyes at everyone regardless

thatch scene where she winds herself up like davros to full dalek scream

xp
No, I just think he was a shite photographer. And I do have a btec first award in art + design, so I'm no bloody mug for a overpromoted posh twat!

"is doing nothing your solution to everything?"

that was precisely how she explained what their duties and raison d'etre was to Dickie when he was getting embroiled in the Coup against Wilson. as in it is our job to do nothing.

Obviously I get why they aren't including Prince Andrew, but I think it's funny that you would be led to believe they only have two kids if you only knew of them from this show.

him and Edward are in a few eps in this season

Ah, okay, guess I should have waited til we got further along.

honestly it feels accurate to my impression of them in general lmao

ie never really being there

slight feeling watching s4 that it was written -- or anyway its main beats and battles were sketched out -- before s1-3 were designed to lead up to it

which maybe why when they arrive they feel a bit pre-chewed

xxxp

You obv haven't seen cold bottle of piss served as Sauvignon Blanc ep yet!

koo stark klaxon!

TIL that koo stark's scenes were cut from star wars before release, too steamy i expect

andrew recounting to mummy the plots of her films that weren't thus bowdlerised

can't believe that the grim march of time has caused the shadow of DRAMATIC IRONY to fall over even the work of koo stark, what a sad world we live in

sorry to bring my *unavowed* class hatred to the thread VG, but it's the best series on netflix right now - I will admit!

Koo Stark's greatest cinematic role as the eponymous Justine in the sexploitation version of the Marquis de Sade, er, bodice ripper turns up on the London Live channel every now and again - after midnight, of course

Koo Stark's dad, Wilbur Stark, produced the Hammer film Vampire Circus and was an executive producer on John Carpenter's The Thing!

watching the carol thatcher scenes i'm reminded of a story swellsy once told me -- that he encountered CT on some radio four "funny" show (she was a presenter, he maybe weote for it) and told her very clearly what everyone thought of her mum, and claimed to me to be astonished that she was upset at his forthrightness lol

calz also reminding me of swells in this regard :D

lol calzino all good! class hatred keeps us honest

lol it has been v amusing itt to see avowed royal haters revealing their deep knowledge of the enemy <3 (myself included)

in the version of the swells story i remembered, this all happened on the occasion of MT's death, but i just checked and MT survived swellsy by four years, which seems a bit of an injustice

pls explain wtf you are talking abt, i am so lost

seething swells = NME 80's/90's writer from Bradford/Swindon who was a formative influence on lots of us ilxers of a certain age

he was extremely left wing and voluble about it

lots of UK ilxers I should have said!

his spirit is very much in the Fagan episode (ep5 I think?)and also the spirit of Yosser Hughes gobbing off at job centre staff as the only means of retaining some vestige of dignity.

^^ ^^
well probs a bit of a stretch, but I am rather fresh rn!

got it! thx

queen: "i thought we didn't listen to chatter?"
margaret: "i listen to nothing else!"

I didn't know about the Fagan incident(s) at all. Apparently pretty much everything depicted is true right up until he has an actual conversation with Lizo?

does she say " i know you and you cannot sing"?

i remember the story at the time being that they had a conversation!

that doesn't mean they did but it was definitely recounted that way

i suspect he may not have said "yr palace is shabby and yr paint is peeling, you should hire me as your decorator" -- which is the kind of good thing to say no one thinks to say to two days afterwards

they shd have hired him imo

he showed great initiative

drama-wise, i thought focusing in on him was a good way to show the social impact of Thatcher, down to her barking over the radio at every waking moment etc

i read elsewhere that Fagan irl was just up for a bit of a lark rather than desperate to talk to her (& he also said he had done a ton of mushrooms that took him 2 years to come down from) ... or something to that effect. cant find link tho :(

oh and that line he says to his council member - “I’m not mentally ill. I’m just poor” was v good

also was that the ep where you see the mouse dart across the floor in one of the rooms? lol

Am I imagining it or is that building up to Liz having to roll over and show her soft side over Diana's death, because they were worried that if she didn't, the government wouldn't give them the money they needed to do up Buckingham Palace? Or am I years apart on those two things? (I know I could google this.)

as calz noted upthread yosser hughes in boys from the black stuff (a TV series broadcast the same year) was an out-of-work character endlessly confronted by impossible bureaucracy and frustrating obstacles: his much-repeated phrase was "gissajob" (also nutting ppl lol) (they deserved it tho, probably -- anyway i think fagan's story has been written to resemble yosser's more than it possibly did, but if so it was a good decision

it's abt 15 years apart isn't it? (without googling lol, someone else can do that)

also was that the ep where you see the mouse dart across the floor in one of the rooms? lol

Nah, that was the episode where she meets with all of the kids to figure out her favorite.

Holy shit, Buckingham Palace is currently undergoing a £369 million refurbishment. Mmmmm, value.

that catches a lot of mice

"mr fagan did say it was looking a bit dreary"

I am, again, catching up, so let me note for the record that I've seen not a single convincing screen portrait of LBJ and The Crown's is the worst yet: the Kennedy definition of Uncle Cornpone.

probably needs its own thread but we shd dig into why impersonations of politicians -- some maybe more than others -- are so hard, i think it's interesting

The Kurgan as LBJ and Dexter as JFK, they were both casting fails imo. It's a long time since I watched it but wasn't Tom Wilkinson's LBJ in Selma at least decent or not terrible?

I'd imagine most actors doing LBJ would have a good listen to the LBJ Whitehouse tapes to crib some of his off camera sweary mannerisms, but not a good approach for a bad actor perhaps.

LBJ was the classic protean politician: he would not have behaved like Foghorn Leghorn around anyone he was in awe of. Also, I've read Caro, Zelizer, etc: he did NOT turn into a lunatic at the mention of the Kennedys.

Wilkinson got his energy, but I haven't yet seen the performance that understands his extraordinary sweetness and charm when he wanted to deploy them, or even his intelligence.

yeah LBJ and JFK were both definite fails

I don't believe for a moment can quote Saul Bellow (Dangling Man wtf!), let alone know who he is.

*Charles can

Actually I don't think Charles is as dim as either his sons or his late wife.

I doubt he could, or would, quote Saul Bellow though!

charles definitely reads, tho besides the thoughts of his beloved pal sir laurens van der post, it seems like it's mainly fingerwaggy tomes of non-fiction essays, the great, the good and the commonwealth highborn around the earnestly setting out ways to make the world better that don't involve e.g. abolishing the monarchy (j. c. kapur's our future: consumerism or humanism, hrh sultan nazrin shah's reflections and recollections)

the only fiction that i can find approval of on a quick google is lol harry potter (and tbf that's camilla saying he likes doing the voices for the grandchildren) plus apparently he enjoys quoting wordswrth

bellow won the nobel prize which is exactly the kind of fact i wd expect the more diligent royals to have absorbed and processed for regurgitation in the kinds of cultural conversation the front-facers have to have -- so in this narrow sense he has certainly heard of bellow

dutiful i think mean, rather than diligent

he's written several of that fingerwaggy kind of book himself in fact

:D

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61zTuNOifuL.jpg

i remember the story at the time being that they had a conversation!

that doesn't mean they did but it was definitely recounted that way

Randy Quaid did the best LBJ that I ever saw, in the 80's or 90's on some network miniseries.

xp

it's a good season. The Die and Charles show is a drag at times but then amusing when he gets pwned by the Aussie pm and his own mum for being a pathetic self-absorbed drip who everyone but Camilla despises!

I will be interested to see if any good articles get written by people young enough to not really remember the whole Diana story beyond her being dead now. Obviously as a fifty-year-old person living in the affected islands, the whole thing is such a part of the fabric of my life, I could never watch the show with any kind of distance or objectivity, but I'm curious about whether the programm is as loaded or foreshadowy as we all think it is, just because we know what it's foreshadowing, and what it's loaded with.
I wouldn't have thought it was possible not to know the details, but I heard John Mulaney and Nick Kroll talking to Pete Davidson on Oh Hello, the P'dcast about it, and he only had the very vaguest idea of who Diana even was. I know he's not exactly renowned for his razor-sharp brain, but he can't be the only one who doesn't really know about her.
Even when they were talking about it on Gogglebox the other night, and they were playing the scene from the engagement press conference, all the parents knew what Charles was going to say before he said it, because it was such a big deal at the time. I don't really remember that at all.

I'm not a "remember where you were ..." sort of person, but I happened to be at a concert when the singer stopped in the middle of the set to offer thoughts and prayers for Diana, so now I'll never forget.

My wife notoriously forgets about shows she's started, sometimes for years at a time (she has a lot on her mind). She did, however, pick up on all of the praise for Season 4 of The Crown so decided to dive back in. I'd heard good things, too, and decided to join her. She got it started downstairs while I was cleaning up after dinner and I met her a few minutes later. I plop down on the couch, and there's Claire Foy, mourning the death of the king. "Must be a flashback," I say. A few minutes go by and they are making funeral plans. "Weird," I say. "This is pretty long for a flashback; you'd think they covered this stuff pretty thoroughly back in the first season." A few more minutes and she's meeting with Churchill and talking about the future coronation. "This definitely seems pretty strange for a flashback," I say again. "It's been 20 minutes or so and it's covering stuff that just had to have been covered already. Isn't Gillian Anderson supposed to be in this as Margaret Thatcher? Are you ... sure you're watching Season 4?" "I *think* I'm sure," she says, not at all sure. "Why don't you check?" I suggest. And indeed, she was midway through ... Season One, Episode 3, which is as far as she'd made it years before.

Needless to say, she was pretty embarrassed. We belatedly started Season 4, Episode 1, and it seemed pretty good! But she fell asleep 10 minutes in.

i caught myself in old-age nostalgia when they cut the wedding short & i was all WHAT THE FUCK. I think i honestly had somehow thought they’d do the whole thing? which is obv insane & unnecessary lmao

had weird deja vu moments during Aus episode, the footage of them with baby William on the blanket w Uluru in the background was on the news & telly & all the womens mags that my Mum & my Nan bought ... and in my mind’s eye even now weirdly blends w images of Lindy Chamberlain (lol) - and that gala where they danced! My barbie had a dress v similar so i just thought she was like some kind of fairytale lady, the absolute bees knees

When I was about 8 my Our Lady of Lourdes junior school classmates all met Diana at the Irish centre in Huddersfield. I didn't as I was excluded from the trip for being naughty, boys hoo!

boo hoo stupid fucking correct autocorrect!

My main memory of Diana is her being relentlessly and mercilessly ripped to shreds, denigrated and insulted by the British press up till the second she died and thereafter it being punishable by death to say anything critical about her.

“... never stopped me though.”

They've done a fantastic job in the show of highlighting the age difference between her and Charles. The only thing that I can say in defence of people at the time was that she never actually looked that much younger than him (or maybe that's just the photos they chose to publish). She was just as tall (and taller in heels), and that Sloaney fashion style made everyone look middle-aged.

yeah i dont think i ever had a sense of how young she was at the time ~at all~

The “You’re Wrong About” podcast did a good series on Diana that includes a lot of stuff i’d never heard that revealed more of her as a human who sometimes did some not-great things. **Like pushing her elderly stepmother down a flight of stairs**

But also underlines the clear fact that Charles was an island of a man who could not relate to her in any way shape or form & was deeply resentful of her popularity (as was the rest of the family)

Like imagine in an alternate universe where the royal family were completely diff people who had put resentment & jealousy aside & maybe drafted off her popularity to help their image & reposition their role lmao what a conceot

the paedo's princess

lol

i had to doublecheck he was in his early 30s when they married, i'd remembered it that he was 42 and she was 18 😬

She looked 42 and his emotional age was 18.

uncle dickie coached him well

Dickie's last note to Charles : I think I'm about to get my bollox blown off by the RA - don't be a massive paedo like me. Or am I getting this wrong way round.. Yeah I meant to say do be a massive posh paedo twat like me!

I wouldn't have thought it was possible not to know the details, but I heard John Mulaney and Nick Kroll talking to Pete Davidson on Oh Hello, the P'dcast about it, and he only had the very vaguest idea of who Diana even was. I know he's not exactly renowned for his razor-sharp brain, but he can't be the only one who doesn't really know about her.

Pete Davidson was minus 11 years old when some rich cunts from a weird island a long way away from his island got married! I'd be startled if he has much stronger a grip on the details of the American equivalent though, the starcrossed romance between King Bill Clinton and a blushing young staffer when Davidson was 2. (George St Geegland and Gil Faizon should definitely interview him again to find out.

Which episode of this has fake Australia in?

the ep is called Terra Nullius

or ep 6

bellow won the nobel prize which is exactly the kind of fact i wd expect the more diligent royals to have absorbed and processed for regurgitation in the kinds of cultural conversation the front-facers have to have -- so in this narrow sense he has certainly heard of bellow

― mark s,

Sure, but quoting from one of Bellow's more obscure and earlier novels a passage so DON'T YOU SEE in is aptness struck me as ridiculous.

This is the piece I was looking for about his intellectual enthusiasms:

The canniest of these flatterers, and the one who had the most lasting impact, was Laurens van der Post, a South African-born author, documentary filmmaker, and amateur ethnographer. He dazzled Charles with his visionary talk—of rescuing humanity from “the superstition of the intellect” and of restoring the ancients’ spiritual oneness with the natural world—and then convinced Charles that he was the man to lead the crusade. “The battle for our renewal can be most naturally led by what is still one of the few great living symbols accessible to us—the symbol of the crown,” he wrote to the Prince. It’s no wonder that Charles was seduced. The life of duty opening up before him was a dreary one of cutting ribbons at the ceremonial openings of municipal swimming pools and feigning delight at the performances of foreign folk dancers. Here was an infinitely more alluring model of princely purpose and prerogative.

Under the influence of van der Post and his circle, Charles began exploring vegetarianism, sacred geometry, horticulture, educational philosophy, architecture, Sufism. He received Jungian analysis of his dreams from van der Post’s wife, Ingaret. He visited faith healers who helped him uncork “a lot of bottled feelings.” Staying with farmers in Devon and crofters in the Hebrides, he played at being a horny-handed son of toil. He travelled to the Kalahari Desert and saw a “vision of earthly eternity” in a herd of zebras. On his return from each of these spiritual and intellectual adventures, he sought to share the fruits of his inquiries with his people.

Over the years, Charles has set up some twenty charities reflecting the range of his Bouvard-and-Pécuchet-like investigations. He has written several books, including “Harmony,” a treatise arguing that “the Westernized world has become far too firmly framed by a mechanistic approach to science.” He has sent thousands of letters to government ministers—known as the “black spider memos,” for the urgent scrawl of his handwriting—on matters ranging from school meals and alternative medicine to the brand of helicopters used by British soldiers in Iraq and the plight of the Patagonian toothfish. He has given countless speeches: to British businessmen, on their poor business practices; to educators, on the folly of omitting Shakespeare from the national curriculum; to architects, on the horridness of tall modern buildings; and so on.

ta calz!

I've got vague or possibly even fake tabloid paper memories of Aussies in the crowd loudly cheering and clapping when Charles injures himself falling off his horse!

It's fun watching fictional Charles getting increasingly jel that Diana is massively popular with Aussie plebs and finally getting completely crushed when bob hawke says something like "she's probably set back the Australian republican movement by 20 years, I thought you'd do a job for us just by being yourself"

Prince Charles 'asked New Zealand to stop making fun of him for falling off a horse'

(he had fallen three times in six weeks, most recently in Sydney)

sic - Hawkey gets the Richard Roxburgh treatment & it is v chef’s kiss

I noted you saying so upthread, yes, that's 30% of my interest!

btw total sidebar on the Hawke tip but you might somewhat enjoy the Angus Sampson / Leigh Whannell collabo film The Mule, a drug smuggling comedy set across the time the '83 America's Cup race is on TV

maybe "does prince charles read novels (apart from harry potter)?" can be my debut quora query

my alg there is already totally fucked for no reason i can discern, it will at least drag it away from dumb questions abt chernobyl

xpost oh hell yes, i will investigate! love both those guys!

I watched the Australian episode and: 30% good job, 63% lol at faking Australia*, but holy shit is this terrible writing. Does Morgan always do the all-exposition all-the-time dialogue?

QUEEN: "As you know, the Australian Prime Minister is an ex-unionist who believes it is time for a republic. Perhaps this trip will win hearts and minds among the colonies."

AUSSIE PM: "As you know, [GOOGLE NAME OF A SECOND AUSTRALIAN LATER, IF YOU HAVE TIME BEFORE FLYING TO VIENNA TO VISIT YOUR FIVE PRINCE AND PRINCESS CHILDREN. LEAVE BLANK OTHERWISE], I reckon it's past time we became a republic. This jug-eared bastard might turn the tide for us by parading around the joint."

QUEEN: "One hears that she is becoming popular with the heathens whom one desires to continue owning."

CHARLES: "You're becoming bloody popular by clinging to that baby!"

DIANA: "Maybe I'm becoming popular BECAUSE I'm clinging to that baby, who is my son. And yours!"

AUSSIE PM: "As you know, you jug-eared bastard, I reckon we ought to become a republic. But that woman has become bloody popular parading around the joint. Have a beer, I know you must also possess a growing jealousy toward her that will escalate in future episodes."

* the CGI'd Sydney Opera House was hilairs: characters in the foreground in focus, crowd of thousands in background out of focus, enormous building behind the crowd somehow magically in focus again. I guess they just went with the first result on Shutterstock?

prob not the best idea to watch that one episode & nothing else? lmao

a lot of the dialogue is expositiony bc they dont assume the audience knows or remembers much of anything
i think maybe also bc overall timeline for the show is pretty truncated

but it is honestly not an impediment to enjoyment of the show or at least not as big of a deal as you make it out to be

Until the Falklands War, Gillian Anderson, sorry, is just awful. I know she's playing a caricature, but the Thatcher I've watched in dozens of videos and read about wasn't this dry plank: she knew how to flirt and charm even if the queen paralyzed her.

This is a poor SNL parody.

how dare you use those words to describe Thatcher

the drier the better i say

she knew how to flirt and charm even if the queen paralyzed her

Lol, also greatly enjoyed Bob Hawke and the mention of his status as a former Guinness Book of Records holder for skulling a yard of ale, which iirc he was doing in public up until his death?

Without waving away every valid thing you wrote -- everything, by my estimation -- dramatically we have to understand why Thatcher worked, in the same way Reagan did, and, maybe I'm the American responding to her secondhand through YouTube, bios, and the news after 1987 (i.e. when I came of age), but, even acknowledging her problem with women, the Anderson take is TOO self-conscious.

"everything, by my estimation" = all valid

like, Anderson's Thatcher comes off as a Greer Garson rendition of Margaret Thatcher, yet what I've seen Thatcher was rather good at constructing this role.

I think perhaps the producers were wary of being seen to soften her image, certainly there’s a big swathe of people even just in the UK who like/are interested in the royals but despise Thatcher to this day. Not sure if you’ve seen the coverage over here (no reason why you should, really), but tons of Tories are having their piss boiled over it because they think the portrayal is too unsympathetic. Again, though, I take your point but I think you are focusing on the wrong reasons why she won people over - her image was a part of it, but it was her hardness and decisiveness that a certain type of person responded most to.

lol I'm communicating poorly. Until the Falklands episodes, her hardness is laughable -- a goon show caricature. And, yes, I know, many will say YES THAT'S HOW SHE CAME OFF but Gillian Anderson comes off as a person who's studied what people wrote about Thatcher. I understand the meticulousness with which Thatcher constructed her poshness, but certainly in America Thatcher, like Reagan, came off as a thorough Gatsby-esque fabrication; the seams didn't show.

i heard a podcast interview w the creator & he said Anderson often takes many months/years to develop a character

ie the voice she did as Thatcher was noticeably much improved that in post production she volunteered to do some ADR on her initial episodes

i think she grew into her performance overall as the season progressed

anderson's thatcher is great. the harshness and fragility, the self-consciousness that hides behind self-righteousness, this is not just a performance of a human being but a whole economic and moral outlook. she's playing thatcherism.

the performances are tremendous this season. and of all of them, helena bonham carter is the best.

charles wins it for me, lizzy close second

they're all very good. i find myself feeling real anger toward him due to his cowardice and selfishness.

emma corrin's diana also incredible. very understated, really.

I wonder if it helps that she wasn't around for this when it was happening.

Unfortunately people of my age remember it too well.

I realize I've never heard Charles speak a single sentence, and I've grown up with him.

Is that accent real?

legit

Lol, also greatly enjoyed Bob Hawke and the mention of his status as a former Guinness Book of Records holder for skulling a yard of ale, which iirc he was doing in public up until his death?

He set the Guinness Record for a yard as a 26-year-old Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1955, quit booze flat for his entire parliamentary career (1980-91, set a zero emissions by 1995 target before getting knifed out), and returned to it gradually afterward. He would publicly skull a glass deep into his eighties to entertain randos, but just with regular schooners (375ml), not the yard glass he'd made his name with (1400ml / 2.5 pints / 91oz?).

Here he is being handed a cup at the cricket and taking it to the dome in ten, aged 82 or so:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2skct9

anderson's thatcher is great. the harshness and fragility, the self-consciousness that hides behind self-righteousness, this is not just a performance of a human being but a whole economic and moral outlook. she's playing thatcherism.

― treeship.,

An excellent description of the scriptwriters and director's intentions.

behold Prince Chuck in all of his warm-blancmange glory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg_fib2gQaU