Netflix series "The Crown"

[pim]

I recently managed to binge watch the first series. Not all 10 episodes at once, I hasten to add! It really is superb. Claire Foy is wonderful as the young Queen Elizabeth II. I'd seen her before as Ann Boleyn in Wolf Hall and she played what I think is the definitive Ann Boleyn just as Glenda Jackson made the character of Elizabeth 1 her own in that superb BBC series of yesteryear "Elizabeth R". Nobody has come near Glenda Jackson in that role, not even Cate Blanchett and I think Claire Foy has done the same for Ann Boleyn. But it's in the series "The Crown" that Claire Foy has come into her own. She shines as the young Elizabeth II. The costumes are magnificent and the acting is superb. As is the music and the camera work. There are nits to pick and I'll come to those but before I get negative I wanted to leave the overall judgement that the series is su-perb. See it! I can't wait for Series 2.

Now some nits to pick. There aren't too many. The guy playing Prince Philip is all wrong. In my view they cast him as too negative a character. Matt Smith plays Prince Philip. Never heard of him! Churchill is played by John Lithgow in what I think is a pitch at the US market. I recognised the actor of course and he did an OK job as Churchill. Only OK and he didn't "persuade" me as representing the character of the real Winston Churchill. He clearly doesn't know how to smoke a cigar, and why on earth are the Americans so culturally insecure that they have to have an American playing Winston Churchill? It annoyed me that all the characters addressed the Queen as "Ma'am" pronounced the American way rather than as "Mahm" the way the British do. A minor point is how the subtitles use US spelling. I have a slight hearing loss so I need the subtitles.

So much for all that! So see it!

[pim]

Hasn't got to that bit yet. Series 1 covers Royal Tour Down Under #1 only. Apparently the UK press utterly panned Menzies' quoting that bit of mawkish doggerel by Byron to the Queen. I think they called the speech "vomitous". If you watch the footage Her Maj does a distinct embarrassed double take. 'Tis said she blushed! A Royal Blush? Oh misère!

[pim]

I've started on series #2. Not a patch on the first one. Nothing to do with Claire Foy's acting which is superb and it's what keeps me watching. It's the bullshit factor in the series. Too many scenarios that are unbelievable and couldn't have happened. The result is just another soapie. If they were going to do a soapie on the Royal Marriage between Her Maj and HRH, they could have waited until they'd both shuffled off this mortal coil. As it is, it's just a little unseemly - he sniffs!

[pim]

I chose to read that post. This is a less fraught forum. Did I pass any comment anywhere on any extra curricular frolics that HRH may/may not have indulged in? Read my post again. Carefully. Parse it if you have to. Understand what I posted. Feel free to ask questions if you have trouble understanding me. Or don't. It's entirely up to you.

[pim]

You may choose to believe what you want. I feel no need to share any opinion I may hold on "The Crown" with you and whatever you might choose to spam the thread with will remain a matter of indifference to me - and "hidden".

[pim]

I watched episode 4 of series 2 and my discomfort at the increasingly tabloid portrayal of the Royal Family grows apace. The title of the series is "The Crown" which suggests a focus on the institution. Instead what we're getting is a soap opera of a wealthy and privileged family. Claire Foy's acting is what saves the series from descending into utter bathos and the sets/costumes are superb. But it's unseemly. Episode 3 was about the extra marital boofheadedness of Prince Philip (in my view the weakest actor in both series). To be honest I have no interest in the soap opera aspects of the royal marriage. Was he unfaithful? I really couldn't give a rodent's posterior. If it impacted on the Queen's role as constitutional monarch in the way that, say, her uncle's marriage nearly brought down the monarchy in 1936 then yes it would be relevant. That is of course if series 2 were serious about living up to the title "The Crown". Episode 4 focuses on the unhappiness of Princess Margaret and the uselessness/pointlessness of her existence in which because she stands in line of royal succession she is subject to the limitations placed by the law of succession on who she can marry. I like the way Margaret is portrayed. The actress gives a strong performance in the role. In terms of acting and costuming "The Crown" has a lot of strengths and ticks a lot of boxes. What I don't like about it is that Netflix shows it now. The Queen is in her 90s. Surely they could wait another 10 years and give her time to go to her Eternal Reward and for the UK to give her the Best Royal Funeral Ever. Whatever you might think of the monarchy the reign of QE2 has been Best Practice in the constitutional monarchy model of parliamentary government. She's earned the right to go out in style without her life being reduced to a soap opera while she's still alive.

[pim]

Episodes #5 and #6 of "The Crown" are a huge improvement and have rescued the series from becoming an unseemly wallow in the soap opera tabloid aspects of the royal marriage between Her Maj and HRH. Episode #5 deals with the effect of the Suez crisis on the monarchy. It drives home the point that Suez was the coup de grace that finally smashed any lingering idea of Britain as a global imperial power and basically convinced the Brits that they needed to downsize and come to terms with their geopolitical reality of being not much more than a fog-bound island off the coast of Europe. Long term the outcome was Britain joining the European Union in the 1970s. The irony today in 2017 is that Britain's stupid Brexit frolic represents a misguided longing to deny all the lessons of the Suez crisis and to take Britain back to some mythical past - but I digress. In episode #5 the monarchy is brought face to face with the changes in post Suez Britain and the absolute necessity for the monarchy to reform itself in line with these changes. One of the results was the use of television. But no more spoilers. It's a very good episode in the way it portrays the changing and evolving relationship of the monarchy with ordinary people.

Episode #6 deals with the ongoing saga of the Duke of Windsor and his wife. There are things that the episode portrays which cannot be known, such as the content of the final private conversation between the disgraced Duke of Windsor and his niece the Queen. Private audiences with the Queen are never revealed so we really are talking about creative script-writing here. Nevertheless there is a solid basis of research-based fact in that episode as it centres on the Marburg Files, particularly that section of the 400 tonnes of Nazi documents seized by the Allies in 1945 at Marburg castle in Germany that details the links between the Duke of Windsor and the Hitler regime. In episode #6 the Queen has to deal with a petition from her uncle, the former King, to be brought back from exile and "given a job" because, he says, he wants to "serve his country". Basically the Queen is briefed on just how the Duke "served his country" both as king and afterwards before and during WW2. Facts are revealed and a stomach-turning past is exposed. The Duke of Windsor is a security risk at best and a downright traitor to his country at worst and we're treated to the sight of the Queen giving her uncle A Piece of Her Mind and a right royal Dressing Down as she revokes her permission for him to visit the UK and packs him off back into exile. Part of the deal when Edward 8 abdicated in 1936 was that he could only return to the UK with the permission of the Sovereign. So the Duke was in the UK during the episode by grace and favour of his niece the Queen. She could revoke that "grace & favour" at any time. And she did. It was a great scene.

These were good episodes and I hope the series continues at this high standard.

[KTJ]

I can remember a television series in New Zealand way back in the 1970s called “Buck House” featuring John Clarke in one of the starring roles.

It was way back before his Fred Dagg years and waaaaaaaaaaay back before he moved to Australia.

It was about a bunch of university students in a squalid student flat in Wellington. I seem to recall that John Clarke was one of the script-writers, and it was brilliant satire at its absolute best which threw shit at a lot of topics, including turning the flat into a parody of the British royal family during student parties.

[KTJ]

from The Washington Post....

Fact-checking ‘The Crown’: Did the Duke of Windsor
plot with Hitler to betray Britain?

The allegations about the former king are raised in the popular Netflix show “The Crown”.
It depicts the discovery of secret German documents after the war ended.

By MICHAEL S. ROSENWALD | 6:00AM EST - Saturday, December 30, 2017


The Duke and Duchess of Windsor at their controversial meeting with Adolf Hitler in 1937. — Photograph: Associated Press.

IN late October of 1937, Adolf Hitler welcomed a rather well-known couple to his mountain retreat for a cup of tea.

Hitler, by then, was German chancellor — a vehement anti-Semite taking an ever tightening and violent hold on the country. As a host, he couldn't have been more pleasant.

“Before tea,” The New York Times reported, “Hitler showed his guests the house and grounds. They stood for some time on the terrace looking down into Austria, with the border town of Salzburg framed between the mountains.”

After a two-hour visit, the couple said goodbye. Hitler gave the Nazi salute. So did the man he had welcomed — the Duke of Windsor, who only months before had abdicated his royal crown to marry Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee who accompanied him for tea.

The extraordinary moment is referenced in Episode 6 of the new season of “The Crown”, the hit Netflix series that chronicles Queen Elizabeth II's early reign. The show is factually inspired but highly dramatized, often prompting viewers to hit pause — not to get popcorn but to rifle through the Internet to answer holy-smokes-did-that-really-happen questions.

In the case of the Nazis, viewers have had plenty to Google.

The show has depicted, among other shockers, Prince Philip's sister's relationship with Nazis and his marching with Nazi officers at her funeral. (All true.) But it's the issues raised in Episode 6 this season that are truly jaw-dropping. Was the duke a Nazi sympathizer? Did he plot to dethrone his brother, King George VI? Did he really suggest more German bombing of Britain might end World War II?

The allegations are raised in the episode via highly secret German army documents and telegrams discovered after the war ended. Winston Churchill tries to cover up the discovery and stop historians from publishing the damning papers. The queen, played by Claire Foy, reads the documents in her study, her face pale, her hand on her brow. The duke denies everything.

This isn't just TV, though.

This actually happened — not totally as depicted, but darn near close.


The Duchess and Duke of Windsor, left, visited Adolf Hitler at his home in Germany. On Hitler’s left is Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front.
— Photograph: Associated Press.

The duke's relationship with the Nazis, as detailed in the secret file, has been examined over the years by historians and journalists, none of whom can agree on whether the papers represented the duke's actions or were simply Nazi propaganda, as the monarchy has long claimed.

Perhaps the most hair-raising and fascinating account is a seemingly forgotten academic paper published in 1997 titled “The Windsor File”. Written by Paul Sweet, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and historian involved in the eventual publication of the papers, the account details the duke's Nazi associations and the long, ultimately unsuccessful effort at suppression.

“From his youth,” Sweet wrote, “Edward had manifested a fondness for the German language and culture.” But his feelings went way beyond that, the historian says, citing diaries of former diplomats and others who knew him:

His pro-German feelings frequently found expression in indiscreet remarks that were not only insensitive to the brutalities of the Nazi regime but critical of “slip-shod democracy”. In July 1933, he told former Kaiser Wilhelm II's grandson, Prince Louis Ferdinand, that it was “no business of ours to interfere in Germany's internal affairs either re Jews or re anything else”. “Dictators are very popular these days,” Edward had added. “We might want one in England before long.”

The duke's leanings were passed on through spy channels to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who is depicted in “The Crown” as having an affair with Simpson. (Rumors, never proved definitively. But he did send her a lot of flowers.) Hitler liked the idea of working with the duke, who had an affinity for the Germans and an ax to grind in Britain.

Churchill came to fear the duke would cause him problems with the Nazis, Sweet wrote, so he asked him to become governor of the Bahamas. The duke, who also held the title of major-general in the army, hemmed and hawed. “Eventually Churchill became so frustrated that he reminded Edward in a telegram that even major-generals could be court-martialed,” Sweet wrote.

The duke's dalliances with the Nazis were detailed in cables, telegrams and other documents — the cache discovered after the war. There was some bizarre stuff, most notably details of a plot for the Germans to, in a friendly manner, kidnap the duke to prevent him from going to the Bahamas. The goal for Hitler: Get the duke his crown back to help end the war, so Germany could save face.

Churchill and the palace did not, understandably, want the documents published. An international fight over them dragged on for more than a decade. Documents published by the British government this year detailed Churchill's efforts.

“The Prime Minister personally urged the French and US leaders to block publication of the captured German telegrams after the war,” The Telegraph reported, “fearing they would ‘give pain to the Duke’. While he dismissed the documents as ‘German intrigues’, he feared they might cast doubt on the Duke's loyalty.”

No doubt. Churchill lost.


British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Washington D.C. a decade after the end of World War II. — Photograph: Associated Press.

The documents were published in 1957 to the world's astonishment. Russell Baker, who would go on to become a famous columnist, wrote the front-page story for The New York Times, describing the papers as “of dubious validity”.

“Whether the reports on the Duke of Windsor accurately reflected his thinking at the time,” Baker wrote, “or whether they were merely … cocktail party gossip is impossible to tell from the diplomatic reports.”

Upon the publication of the documents, Buckingham Palace issued a statement saying that “His Royal Highness never wavered in his loyalty to the British cause,” adding: “The German records are necessarily a much tainted source. The only firm evidence which they provide is of what the Germans were trying to do in the matter, and of how completely they failed to do it.”

Sweet referenced the statement at the end of his paper. He then gave an academic wink.

“Fortunately,” he wrote, “publication of the documents permits readers to decide for themselves whether the evidence supports this official interpretation.”

Readers, yes. Television viewers, too.

• Michael Rosenwald is a reporter on The Washington Post's local enterprise team. He writes about the intersection of technology, business and culture.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

• VIDEO: Royal scandal: American socialite Wallis Simpson marries Britain's Prince Edward

• Churchill's powerful ‘fight on the beaches’ speech: The words few people actually heard

• Fact-checking ‘The Crown’: Is Prince Philip a total jerk?

• Fact-checking ‘The Crown’: Jackie Kennedy vs. Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace

• Cheers, Prince Harry! But the last time a British royal married an American, it didn't go well.

• Hitler refused to use sarin during WWII. The mystery is why.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/30/fact-checking-the-crown-did-the-duke-of-windsor-plot-with-hitler-to-betray-britain

[KTJ]

from The Washington Post....

Fact checking ‘The Crown’: Queen Elizabeth's faith
and her close relationship with preacher Billy Graham

By SARAH PULLIAM BAILEY | 6:00AM EST — Tuesday, January 09, 2018


Claire Foy, center, and Matt Smith, right, in a scene from “The Crown”. — Photograph: Robert Viglasky/Netflix/Associated Press.

ONE OF the running themes throughout the Netflix show “The Crown” is the devout Christian faith of Queen Elizabeth, who is shown kneeling for prayer by her bedside as her husband jokingly teases her to offer one for him. The queen, after all, serves not just as head of state but head of the Church of England, the mother church of Anglicanism worldwide.

“Monarchy is God's sacred mission to grace and dignify the Earth,” her elderly grandmother, Queen Mary, tells Elizabeth early in the show.

The second season of the series portrays the queen as someone who, feeling betrayed by a family member, wrestled deeply with questions of faith and forgiveness. The show also depicts her budding relationship with famous American evangelist Billy Graham, who drew millions of people to his “crusades” across the globe and was a friend to many U.S. presidents.

Several writers have pointed out how “The Crown” took more liberties with historical fact and chronology in its second season. So did the show take some liberties in depicting the queen's faith and her relationship with the evangelist?

Spoilers ahead!

“The Crown” shows the queen sipping her tea while watching the evangelist on television preach to a packed stadium. Even though several of her family members seemed befuddled by Graham, his fiery preaching style piqued the queen's curiosity, and she asked for a private meeting with him. “I think he's rather handsome,” the queen tells her husband.

“You do speak with such wonderful clarity and certainty,” Elizabeth, played by Claire Foy, tells Graham. After he delivers a sermon for the royal family at Windsor Castle, the queen says that she felt “a great joy” to be “a simple congregant, being taught, being led … to be able to just disappear and be…” “A simple Christian,” Graham replies. “Yes,” Elizabeth says. “Above all things, I do think of myself as just a simple Christian.”

In the show, the royal family struggles with its relationship to former King Edward VIII, Elizabeth's uncle who abdicated the throne to marry a divorcée and became the Duke of Windsor. That familial struggle becomes increasingly tense as the queen learns the family's dark secret: Her uncle had become friendly with the Nazis during World War II, plotted to overthrow his brother and encouraged Germany to bomb England.


Paul Sparks portrays Reverend. Billy Graham in season two of “The Crown”. — Photograph: Netfix.

After learning the shocking details about her uncle, the queen asks Graham open-ended questions about forgiveness. Played by actor Paul Sparks, Graham tells the queen that she should pray for those she “cannot forgive.”

So what really happened? Here's what we know from scholars and books.

1. Evidence of the queen's faith is easily traceable.

Scholars believe the queen possessed a “deep vibrancy of her faith” as someone who read scripture daily, attended church weekly and regularly prayed, said Stan Rosenberg, a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford. Despite suffering some public attacks for her handling of Princess Diana's death and her political views, she is widely admired for her faith, and “folks here know her to be thoughtful, authentic, serious, and devout but not a pressingly intrusive Christian,” he said.

The queen's Christmas messages, a British tradition that goes back to 1932, have provided a window into her private faith.

“I know just how much I rely on my faith to guide me through the good times and the bad,” she said in 2002. “Each day is a new beginning. I know that the only way to live my life is to try to do what is right, to take the long view, to give of my best in all that the day brings, and to put my trust in God. … I draw strength from the message of hope in the Christian gospel.”

2. Queen Elizabeth and Billy Graham met in 1955.

Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's son, said his father had a good relationship with the queen, not necessarily a pen pal relationship where they'd write to each other regularly, but he spoke several times in her private chapel and he was knighted in 2001. But Billy Graham initially met resistance, his son said, and some in Parliament tried to block him from coming. (Franklin Graham, who is planning to speak in September, faces his own version of British resistance now, according to The Guardian).

Franklin Graham said the show asked him to consult but he declined, saying any conversations they had were private. He said his father usually gave a dignitary a Bible, often the latest one he was carrying, so he believes he probably gave the queen one.

“There's no question, she's very devout in her faith and very strong in her faith,” Franklin Graham said. “Her faith has been consistent not just with conversations with my father but throughout her life.”

The queen's meeting with the evangelist came about after Graham launched one of his evangelistic “crusades”. Graham had spoken to “the greatest religious congregation, 120,000, ever seen until then in the British Isles,” according to a biography of the late John Stott, a chaplain to the queen. During one of his rallies, Graham preached for 12 weeks, drawing 2 million.


Billy Graham and Queen Elizabeth II. — Photograph: Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Graham delivered a sermon for the queen on Easter Sunday in 1995 in the royal family's private chapel.

“Good manners do not permit one to discuss the details of a private visit with Her Majesty, but I can say that I judge her to be a woman of rare modesty and character,” he wrote in his autobiography “Just As I Am.”

“She is unquestionably one of the best-informed people on world affairs I have ever met,” wrote Graham, who is now 99 years old and living in his mountain home in Montreat, North Carolina. “… I have always found her highly intelligent and knowledgeable about a wide variety of issues, not just politics.”

3. It's unlikely, although still possible, that the two met alone.

“The Crown” shows the queen meeting alone with the evangelist so they could discuss things privately. However, Graham long had a personal rule that he would not meet alone with another woman, something that became known as “the Billy Graham rule” and has come under the spotlight since Vice President Pence has said he uses the same rule.

Historian and Graham biographer William Martin says Billy Graham began the practice in 1948, and it encompassed lunches, counseling sessions, even a ride to an auditorium or an airport because the pastor believed it helped keep him from “even the appearance of evil.”

Martin says, however, that there's not much chance that the queen would have been left truly alone even if no attendant was in the room. But if the queen asked for this, Martin and fellow Graham historian Grant Wacker both believe he probably would've made an exception.

“Graham always meant for the rule to be observed with common sense,” said Wacker, who is a historian at Duke Divinity School. “The point was to prevent candlelit dinners far from home.”

4. How Graham might have responded to the question about forgiveness.

The queen tells Graham she asked him to return to Buckingham Palace to talk about forgiveness. “Are there any circumstances, do you feel, where one can be a good Christian and yet not forgive?” she asks. Graham says Christian teaching is very clear that no one is beneath forgiveness. But forgiveness was conditional, she counters.

“One prays for those one cannot forgive,” he says.

The exchange highlights a fuzzy line between personal forgiveness and public forgiveness. Does Elizabeth, as a niece, have a responsibility to forgive her uncle? Should she, as the queen, extend forgiveness to someone who, by the show and historical documents’ account, betrayed his country?

It's unclear exactly what was said in those meetings. Wacker said that after Graham revealed private conversations with President Harry Truman, Truman never forgave him, and Graham resolved not to discuss any conversation with any head of state ever again.

However, Queen Elizabeth has made several public comments about the role of forgiveness in her life.

“Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith,” she said in 2011. “It can heal broken families, it can restore friendships and it can reconcile divided communities. It is in forgiveness that we feel the power of God's love.”

5. The queen mother might have liked Graham more than the series portrayed.

The show portrays the queen and the queen mother watching the evangelist on television, and the queen mother appears shocked that England seems enthralled by “someone who learned their trade selling brushes door-to-door in North Carolina,” and that people would turn “out in droves for an American zealot.” “He's not a zealot,” Elizabeth tells her mother. “He's shouting, darling,” she replies. “Only zealots shout.”

But “The Crown” historical consultant Robert Lacey writes in his show companion book that the queen mother possessed “a deep and literal faith”, “experienced the Second World War as a battle against godlessness,” and welcomed Graham's visits.

In Graham's autobiography, he wrote that the queen mother had a “quiet but firm faith.”

“The last time I preached at Windsor, as I walked in I saw her sitting over to my right, with others in the royal family,” he wrote. “She deliberately caught my eye and gestured slightly to let me know she was supporting me and praying for me.”

6. Ruth Graham probably didn't wear ugly shoes to meet the queen.

Anne Blue Wills, who is working on a biography of Ruth Graham, Billy Graham's wife, says that it's unlikely that Ruth Graham (seen only from a distance) would have worn flat brown sandals for her visit to Buckingham Palace.

“The whole outfit, actually, struck me as dumpy — and intentionally unattractive Christians were a pet peeve for Ruth,” Wills said.

A picture of the pair leaving for the 1954 crusade aboard the SS United States shows Ruth with a fur stole over one arm wearing leather gloves and a corsage. “She had a great sense of style and unless ugly sandals were ‘in’, I don't think she would have worn them to meet the queen for the first time,” Wills said.

• Sarah Pulliam Bailey is a religion reporter for The Washington Post, covering how faith intersects with politics, culture and … everything.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

• VIDEO: The future Queen Elizabeth marries Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh

www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/01/09/fact-checking-the-crown-queen-elizabeths-faith-and-her-close-relationship-with-preacher-billy-graham

[jody]

Love Tobias in Outlander.

[Gort]

Three episodes into Series 4 of the Crown.

Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher is doing a great job, although I was surprised at the way they are making Thatcher out to be such a heroine.

Diana's story is sickly sweet. (So far.)

Charles is shown up as even more of a ratbag wimp.

Are they a bit hard on Princess Margaret?