From Liz’s misery to Phil the Greek’s gaffes and the PM’s drug habit, Peter Morgan’s Netflix series is a top-quality soap that refuses to bow before the royals A man coughs bloodied lung lining up into a toilet bowl. Later, he asks his doctor if he should be concerned about “a spot of blood in my spittle”. You could only be in England, and so it very much turns out we are. The year is 1947, the toilet bowl is in Buckingham Palace and the man spattering it with sanguineous sputum is King George VI, on the morning of his eldest daughter Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to Johnny Foreigner, known to his friends as Philip Mountbatten. So opens The Crown, Netflix’s latest and most ambitious foray in the world of original programming. It is written by Peter Morgan (who wrote 2006’s Oscar-winning The Queen, and the 2013 play The Audience, which both offered robust takes on the Royal family and its accreted lore), with the first two episodes directed by Stephen Daldry, and is rumoured to have cost £100m to make. Which is one reason – or rather, about 90m of them – that you are seeing it on the streaming service and not on the channel that would seem its most natural home, the BBC. Continue reading...
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