As his warning on The Crown shows, Oliver Dowden needs to catch up with reality
Before the premiere of last year’s season of The Crown, I spent some months working on a story about the series. I visited sets and shoots. I saw Olivia Colman and Helena Bonham Carter share a joke between takes of Winston Churchill’s funeral; they were wearing bedroom slippers under their mourning. I met the costume designers in their workshop at Elstree, who explained to me that for some outfits – those for the big memorable public events, such as the investiture of Prince Charles – they were copying the clothing actually worn on those occasions by the royal family. But most of the time, they were going to make the costumes up. The outfits were going to be plausible. But they were going to be fiction, their creative work.
The work of the costume department seems to me to be a reasonable microcosm for the whole of The Crown. There are big public moments when the royal family, metaphorically or literally, have appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace; we can all agree that these things happened, and it is a matter of public record. And then there is much, much else that we cannot possibly know: everything of the order of what Margaret Thatcher said to Denis when they shut the door on their bedroom(s) at Balmoral. The Crown is a tight weft of fiction woven round a very sparse warp of fact, it is the invention of the pen of Peter Morgan, it is not documentary. Some more clues as to its genre status: actors are playing the characters and it is filed under Drama on Netflix.
This is not enough, it seems, for Oliver Dowden, who has said that Netflix “should be very clear” that the show is made up. “Without this,” the culture secretary told the Daily Mail, “I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.”
It’s worth noting that the previous three seasons of the show did not attract quite this much ire from politicians on the right. The difference surely is that the current storyline – the catastrophe of the Charles-Diana marriage – is just a little bit more disobliging about the royals than those of the other seasons. Oddly enough, such howls of protest did not emanate from Conservative politicians when the films Darkest Hour and Dunkirk were released. While they were also fictions about real events, they were more glorifying of dear old Blighty.
Fiction and fact have often played games with each other, and part of the pleasure of art lies in marking out the territory between them. Nonfiction, including long-form journalism, frequently calls on the tropes of fiction. There is a line here, of course, that shouldn’t be crossed: form may be up for grabs but content is not. It is wrong to make up quotes or scenes that didn’t happen. Even so, it would be naive to imagine that the shaping of a story did not have serious implications for the reception of it. The writer of
nonfiction is always making decisions about how to weight a story, whom to represent, what material to select or to discard. It matters whether you frame your true tale as romance or comedy or crime story. Fairness is something that in the end depends on personal and institutional ethics.
The other side of the coin is that fiction that “feels like” fact has its own particular pleasures; we often want to be half-convinced something is “real” in order to be drawn deeply into it, and thus to appreciate the truths being presented beneath the carapace of fiction. The first English novels often purported to be actual letters between real people, or memoirs. Flirting with the notion that Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders is a real person is part of the tale’s sexy, scandalous fun.
Certain forms of genre fiction are particularly keen on claiming that they are true: take the ghost story. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is elaborately framed as the contents of a manuscript, locked away in a drawer, written in “old, faded ink” by a woman “dead these 20 years”. The hint that it’s all real adds to the creepiness – and yet I don’t think anyone seriously takes it as documentary. This kind of truth claim – attached to material that has sinister or supernatural overtones – has bled over into the most modern form of storytelling, the podcast. BBC Sounds’ The Lovecraft Investigations is a true-crime series examining some fascinating cold cases. At least, it purports to be. Maybe, though, there’s a clue in the title.
Fiction about the royal family is practically a genre in itself; beyond Morgan’s various forays, Alan Bennett has made a habit of it (his story The Uncommon Reader and play, A Question of Attribution) and so have many others (Mike Bartlett’s play Charles III, for instance, which riffs on Shakespeare’s history plays). The royals have a peculiar status in the imagination of the British; like it or not, they are there in the culture, haunting the dreams of royalist and republican alike. Even before the tabloids have woven their more fanciful yarns, the royal family present themselves in story form: as the heroes of their own elaborate ceremonials, the protagonists of expensive pageants. And yet they shut the door tightly, except for certain highly staged moments, on their real thoughts and feelings.
It’s this contrast between visibility and inscrutability that makes them preternaturally susceptible to being shaped into fiction; it must be odd to be a royal person watching oneself being recreated over and over again, but perhaps not the oddest thing about their lives. I think most of us understand this process; in fact the fictional products about the royal family wouldn’t bring such pleasure if they weren’t so obviously speculative and, at times, fantastical. Unfortunately, the culture secretary appears to be a good deal less genre-alert than actual, real-life consumers of culture. Unless, of course, he’s having us on.