The Crown S05
The Crown has a new cast and seems to remain a guilty pleasure that keeps on giving, while the contrast with 2022 Britain feels stronger episode by episode.
The fifth season of The Crown is coming to Netflix two months after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and it is a significant contrast, as the setting is the 90s, where Prince Charles, now played by Dominic West, is growing impatient with the fact that he cannot fulfill the role that he was born to play, while the monarch, now played by Imelda Staunton is facing the titular condition of the first episode, the “Queen Victoria syndrome”.
Prince Charles’ siblings are left more and more on the sidelines in this season, mainly highlighting the discomfort of the head of the Church of England in seeing her children divorcing one after the other. Dominic West portrays a more mature Prince, who has left behind the uncertainties of his youth, and who is ready for a bigger role, a role that he seeks proactively, also reaching out to Prime Minister John Major, played by Jonny Lee Miller with a distinguished white wig. If a pun is allowed, John Major is also probably the most Whig of any Tory PM of the last decades.
The season remains very much around the Royal family, specifically the two main couples, the Queen and Prince Philip, now played by Jonathan Pryce, and Charles and Diana, now played by Elizabeth Débicki. There is space for Princess Margaret, now played by Lesley Manville to walk down Memory Lane with the man that she could never marry, Peter Townsend, now played by 007 Timothy Dalton. Outside the family instead, we have a blast to the past, as we see the Romanoffs, whose patriarch Nikolai II was the cousin of George the V, the grandfather of the Queen, and their deaths. Another ominous blast to the past and a sign of the times is the appearance of Boris Yeltsin, the man who opened the doors for the great neoliberal loot of Russia and Chicago School shock therapy, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and for the rise of Vladimir Putin. Finally, the other main character that we see rise outside the Windsor ranks is Mohamed Al-Fayed, as he rises through British high society dreaming of sitting next to the Queen and whose son, Dodi, we also meet.
Major is there also to embody how the identity politics played by the Tories did not start with Rishi Sunak, as in the 1990s a famous electoral poster of the Conservatives showed this telling and famous sentence “What does the Conservative Party offer a working-class kid from Brixton? They made him Prime Minister”. Major has criticised the show, labeling it as a “barrel load of nonsense”, while referring to a fictitious storyline where the heir to the throne seems to seek his help to convince his mother to abdicate.
This is certainly not the first political criticism of the show, but it would be important to remember that the show is neither a documentary, nor a docu-fiction, as historical events are mixed with fictional ones, and of course, nobody knows, except the involved parties what has been said, during the decades, behind the closed doors of the royal family’s palaces. Also, to be fair, if the show was even more akin to a docufiction, its representation of colonialism would have not been limited to excited people in Africa waving flags or to a stereotyped representation of Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah as an angry Black man ,for some reason. It is interesting to notice that a superheroine show like Ms. Marvel did a better job of representing what British colonialism was, compared to five seasons of a royal-focused show.
As the show is set in the 1990s, the dissolution of Prince Charles and Princess Diana takes a central spot. Diana is now played by Elizabeth Débicki, who, just like Emma Corrin in the fourth season, brings great stature and charisma to her portrayal of the late princess. The point of no return can be seen in the famous 1995 BBC Panorama interview by Martin Bashir with the princess, an interview that, as the Dyson report found out last year, was obtained with false evidence in the form of fake bank statements, presented as alleged payments to people who meant to spy on the princess, certainly contributing to her fears. These fake documents were provided by Bashir to Earl Spencer, brother of the late princess, and the coverup of Bashir’s behaviour by BBC has turned to be a dark page in the history of British journalism, and journalism in general.
There is another character who is not listed in the cast during the show, as it is not a living being, the Britannia, the royal yacht in use from 1954 to 1997. The lobbying pleads by the Queen and Prince Philip to John Major first, and then to Tony Blair, played by stage and TV actor Bertie Carvel (Blair also criticised the show) for the ship repairs, amounting to millions of pounds to charge British taxpayers have been removed by public scrutiny, but are not fictional and are quite telling as these requests came in the years after Black Wednesday and the pound pressure, and a context of social and economic difficulties. In all of this, the royal request is so out of touch and detached from the challenges that their “subjects” are facing.
The decommission of Britannia in 1997 occurs in the same year of the handover of Hong Kong, one of the last vestiges of the British Empire. The crude comment by the Queen Mother in the final episode “Hong Kong is ours. The Chinese are taking it away” in a sentence, encapsulates all the neverending toxic colonial mentality that has been so central in the British political stage since 2016 and Brexit, a nostalgia of a glorious past that was not glorious at all for those under the boots of the British Empire’s brand of white supremacy.
The season closes with a feeling and vibe of change and the landslide victory of the Labour Party led by Tony Blair in 1997, or to be precise, New Labour. It is possible to listen to the echo of the optimistic and cheesy “Things can only get better”, the party’s political broadcast of 1997.
Over twenty years later, the prospect that things can only get better in the United Kingdom can sound both hollow and naive. The contrast between the season and those years, and the experience of the UK today is striking. There is a party that has been in power for too long and has laid waste to the country and its future, an opposition party with a leader, who, unlike Corbyn and Blair, lacks both charisma and vision and a new King, Charles the III, who is seeing more and more countries holding referendums to remove the British monarch as their head of State (and with it, some of the remaining toxic residues of colonialism), not to mention the prospect that the United Kingdom could be reduced to England and Wales in the future.
In any case, while we wait for the final season and enjoy this fifth guilty pleasure in the shape of the fifth season of The Crown, for those of us who live beyond the Channel, we will get to see how the next chapters will unfold, close to home.
The Crown will be released on Netflix worldwide on November 9. All images are courtesy by Netflix.