I finally started season 4 of the crown. It’s different, because it’s gotten to times that I remember. Churchill is history, Lady Di still feels… if not current, certainly not ancient.
My this is depressing.
Also, I’m impressed at how they’ve found (and made up) actors to look like the people they are playing. I recognized Diana at once, and as i Google this and that bit of story to see what really happened, i recognize the photographs in Wikipedia, etc., based on the actors.
“whatever love means…”
Just watched that episode.
(This thread is open spoilers, though, so no worries. I figure all the really big “spoilers” are history, anyway.)
The actors LOOK like the people they are portraying… especially Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher. But her speech and mannerisms were more like a caricature than an actual resemblance of the former PM.
And as I said in another thread… I’m annoyed at the more material deviations from known reality.
Like how Diana and Charles met. The timing of Mark Thatcher’s disappearance. How long Martin Charteris served as Elizabeth’s private secretary. The timing of Michael Shea’s resignation relative to the Commonwealth’s statement against apartheid.
I don’t mind them taking liberties on things that are unknown and basically unknowable… such as precisely how long Charles and Di were faithful to one another, or what Michael Fagan and the Queen discussed when he broke into her bedroom. But for stuff that is clearly and easily fact-checked… I wish they at least tried to get it right.
Since the theme of the show is what the weight of the crown does to the personal lives of the members of the family, i feel like “how long Charles and Diana were faithful to reach other” is central to the truthiness of the show. Whereas how long Martin Charteris served is much less central.
I have mixed feelings about Thatcher and the Falklands. I think they conflated that with her son mostly to create a tighter episode. And Thatcher’s reaction to the Falklands is so in line with her reaction to everything else she does in the show. I never liked Maggie, but she’s a brittle caricature in the show.
I’ve been watching “the crown”. Maggie Thatcher really destroyed Great Britain, at least in this version of history.
Prince Andrew is the one with ties to Epstein.
He’s the one that was Elizabeth’s favorite in The Crown, but he certainly no longer is as he has long clashed with his mother.
He was made the Duke of York when he married Sarah Ferguson. In The Crown Charles was an ass to him on his wedding day and he was bragging about how he was luckier in love than Charles (which of course wasn’t really true, since he also divorced). I’m not sure how accurate that scene was though.
Prince Edward, the youngest, is the one who’d bet his guard that they’d eat salmon for lunch.
At this point he’s probably the most balanced royal though, and I believe the one who has the best relationship with his parents. That may have something to do with being the only one who never divorced, and also that he never sought titles for his kids and has been far more willing than his brother Andrew to take a back seat to Charles, the heir.
As the only son of Elizabeth’s who’s not a duke, it has long been assumed that he would be made Duke of Edinburgh when his father died. I’m mildly curious to see if that’s the case, and if so, how long they wait before they do it. I don’t know how close he is with Charles if it didn’t happen while his mother was alive / monarch. 
I hope you don’t mind, twig, i thought these posts would be better in this topic.
Yes, I’m rewatching the episode. Andrew talks to his mother about the movie his girlfriend was in, where an innocent 17 year old girl is introduced to sexual pleasures by a bunch of old men. I wonder when this show was made…
I don’t mind, but you didn’t move the post I was responding to (where you asked which one was Andrew and which was Edward in the Prince Philip thread) so my posts are kind of misplaced at the moment.
They weren’t really meant as commentary on The Crown… just trying to help you place which brother was which.
My post on Thatcher’s portrayal in The Crown probably belongs in this thread though, particularly since you moved the post I was responding to.
I mean, if you’re going to hold her single-handedly responsible for the 1982 recession and focus on nothing else in her 11 years as PM then sure. They bounced back though and The Crown kind of glosses over that part and only focuses on the bad. She was one of the longest reigning PMs in recent history and won re-election in landslide victories in both 1983 and 1987.
When she took over Britain was in a bad way. They were a global power when she left office. And given her distaste for the EU and the Brexit mess they’re currently dealing with… it might have been cleaner if they’d followed her lead and never joined.
I think The Crown was pretty unfair to her policies. And her demeanor was pretty abrasive, I believe, but Gillian Anderson’s caricature-like performance was downright cringeworthy. I would not like to be her chiropractor… I can’t imagine what damage she must have done to her neck in order to so badly portray Thatcher.
Done
Took awhile because I’m not good at this. 
I see her as single handedly dismembering a lot of GB’s social safety net. It seems like one of the reasons the nation is a worse place to live than a lot of Europe.
But yes, given English exceptionalism, they might have been better off to never join the EU.
Oh that was definitely deliberate. In real life he dated the actress in that movie, but not until later than portrayed in the episode. But since he’s a fairly minor character in the show, I’m sure they wanted to use his appearance to highlight him being a perv… in light of the Epstein connection.
So the episode was made after the Epstein connection made the news.
And for real, he dated a porn star who did movies about being underage? Yikes!
I think there’s some debate as to whether The Awakening of Emily is pornography or not. Disclaimer: I’ve never seen it, so I’m going off what I read.
It seems that the actress (now a photographer) successfully sued a magazine for libel when they called her a porn star. IMDB lists the genre for the movie as “adult” though.
Okay, let me rephrase: He actually dated a woman who starred in a film about men having sex with an underage girl. That’s pretty damn creepy.
Men and women, I think.
He dated some of the men who starred in the show, too?