The royals were always a good sign that I wasn’t at home. Other people’s houses had bits of regal memorabilia, royal weddings on the TV, copies of Majesty lying around. Mine didn’t and I grew up finding the whole monarchy business a bit absurd, even embarrassing – shouldn’t a grownup country have a more rational system for choosing its heads of state than relying on accidents of birth? The Diana circus passed me by, I skipped the 2002 golden jubilee and was irritated when the Kate-William wedding in 2011 turned Pippa Middleton’s bum into a figure of popular culture.
So I don’t really know how it happened that I became obsessed with The Crown, Netflix’s dramatisation of the reign of Elizabeth II. Series four will take us through from the tail end of the 1970s, with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, to the early 1990s. But here I am, sprawled all over a sofa that is distinctly out of keeping with the gorgeous interiors on the show, coming to the end of another riveted binge on the lives of people I once thought were barely even worth holding in contempt.
The history of the royal family and TV is not a comfortable one, something that the show made a nod to in series three, in an episode that focused on the making of the notorious 1969 documentary Royal Family. Conceived as a way to revive public interest in an institution that seemed increasingly remote, it followed a year in the life of the Queen; its broadcast was judged to be such a disaster that it was allowed one repeat before being tightly restricted from circulation. What was intended to humanise ended up trivialising.
Why, then, does The Crown make the royal family seem not just sympathetic but even vital? Because it’s fiction. The 1969 documentary captured real people trying to parcel out just enough of their private lives without compromising their dignified role, with the result that they looked both hollow and silly. The dramatised version is free (or free-ish, within the constraints of historical accuracy and libel law) to fabricate inner lives and the invention feels more real than the real thing ever could.
Take a scene showing the making of the documentary. Prince Phillip walks in on the Queen, Queen Mother and Princess Margaret all seated stonily next to each other, cameras rolling. It will be, you can tell, stultifying stuff for the public. But in The Crown, this is a great TV moment, as Margaret (played with magnificent superciliousness by Helena Bonham Carter) drawls: “We are being filmed watching television, so that people might watch us watching television, on their own television sets at home. This really is plumbing new depths of banality.”
Ah, Margaret. Vanessa Kirby was a fantastic young Margaret in series one and two, but Bonham Carter has come home to the role she was born for. The Margaret of The Crown is a riot – boozy, saucy and glamorous, with that swinging 60s flick of cat-eye liner signifying a very different kind of public figure to the solemn and assiduous Queen. In the third series, we saw her winning over America by ditching conventional diplomacy in favour of lavishing obscene limericks on LBJ (“There was a young lady from Dallas/ Who used a dynamite stick as a phallus…”).
Margaret is a jet-set royal with massive sunglasses and a dazzling wardrobe, the irresistible centre of every room she enters. And she is fabulously, gloriously, bitchy: whether she’s pretending she can’t remember the name of her husband Lord Snowden’s mistress (calling her “the Thing” instead) or brushing away greeters with a bark of “No kissing! Germs!”, Margaret is simply the best thing happening on screen whenever she’s there.
All of a sudden, I’m reading books about Margaret, scouring eBay for Margaret-esque blouses, blasting streams of hairspray at my roots to get that Margaret volume. I have become, like the fans she attracted on her US tour, a Margaretologist.
But by the end of the series three, we had a Margaret with some of the stuffing knocked out. The last we saw of her, she was sore and exhausted, recovering from an overdose of sleeping pills after the collapse of her marriage and her humiliation by the tabloids.
One of the things The Crown is especially good at showing is the human cost of the monarchy and that someone in Margaret’s position has to pay an especially horrible price.
Royalty means astonishing privilege, at the cost of unthinkable sacrifice. You can command an army of servants, but you can’t choose whom to marry (poor Margaret, who as a young woman had to give up Peter Townsend because he was divorced). You belong to an institution that can claim a sacred purpose to the nation, but unless you’re one of the royals who qualifies for official duties, you have very little to do – and almost nothing you’re allowed to do without compromising the majesty of the crown.
Margaret’s miseries are a forerunner of the bleak time coming for Diana, who arrives in series four. And they’re a reminder of what might be the best argument for abolishing the monarchy. Having a hereditary head of state with no actual power is a magic trick to keep democracy working: it takes ingenuity and diligence to sustain and The Crown makes me respect the work of royalty like nothing before it. It makes me, unlikely as it feels, a monarchist. But it makes me see them as human, too, and I wonder whether any human should have to live the way we force our royals to live.
• Sarah Ditum is a writer on politics, culture and lifestyle
