Additional royal insights

The third series of Netflix’s lavish drama The Crown was launched a couple of days before Prince Andrew’s ill-judged interview with Emily Maitliss, and a week or so after Harry and Meghan’s candid but much criticised ITV documentary.

Though the drama is a work of fiction which imagines what went on behind the palace doors during key historical events, it certainly explores themes and patterns which are plain for all to see in today’s real-life exposure of the royals. Duty v self-indulgence; stiff upper-lip v self-expression; the problem of what a second son or daughter is to do; and the burden created when a flesh-and-blood person becomes a symbol of the state.

Of course, these tensions are not a surprise – Shakespeare covered pretty all of them in his history plays – but The Crown brings them into the 21st century in a very accessible way.

Recognising the regal

And this is a delight to watch. The acting is almost impeccable throughout, with Olivia Colman’s Queen allowing uncertainty and warmth to show beneath a starchy exterior, and Helena Bonham Carter’s Princess Margaret exuding glamour and great vulnerability. These are characters we feel we know already, and so there is satisfaction when we see, for example, Charles as a combination of self-absorption and earnestness, hands rammed in his pockets.

We recognise these royals, who are just the right side of caricatures; they interest us, but can’t really surprise us, because we feel we know them already. And perhaps that familiarity, along with the gorgeous, completely plausible sets and costumes, as well as an educational dose of political detail, means we forget that this is fiction.

It can seem dangerously as though there is little difference between the real interviews with today’s royals and these stories guessing the gaps of previous years. All become a type of performance for us to consume or criticise, and the people behind the drama harder to care about.

There’s a deliberate irony in the episode which shows the royals experimenting with allowing the cameras into their everyday lives in an attempt to improve their public image; it’s a disaster, and the resulting documentary is mothballed. As Harold Wilson (played brilliantly by Jason Watkins) explains to a perplexed Queen, people want the royal family ‘not to be normal’, and even ‘to be ideal’.

Sitting on our sofas today, perhaps the same is true for us. We want to think of our leaders as in a different category from us (royal, but in politics and church as well), larger than life and extreme, whether that means more dutiful, more spiritual or more outrageous, or even more wicked. The glamorous veneer which covers their lives, even their infidelities, somehow elevates our lives too, for good and ill.

Emblems of comfort and love

But there is more than soap opera here. A number of the episodes of this series have probed the nature of faith.

We meet Prince Philip’s mother, who had been serving as a Greek orthodox nun as well as the new Dean of Windsor. Both roles have an impact on Philip and communicate a peace and a difference which are attractive and a challenge to the restless and sometimes angry Queen’s Consort. In the moving episode centred on the Aberfan disaster, the centrality of chapel life is seen, offering some comfort to the grieving.

Faith, though we are not told in what, is quietly presented as a solution to the tension between self-interest and self-denial, as comfort in distress. Maybe this theme is prominent because of the American market, or maybe it is the subject of royalty which brings this to the fore.

I was going to write about how rare this sympathetic presentation of the church and its representatives is, but then I remembered the very funny BBC spoof docu-drama, This Country, in which the vicar, wet though he is, is the only reliable and caring adult around.

It’s heartening to remember that Christianity is still seen by many as offering meaning and hope. Perhaps we need to pray that these soft secular representations speak out of the different, distant worlds on our screens and are used by the Holy Spirit to stir a new openness to the gospel.

And perhaps too, we need to be bolder and speak into our world which is so hungry for ideals, explaining as the Queen herself says, only God is ideal, but more than this, that in Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, the ideal, comes close in love.