Restraint is probably the mark of the true artist, but still it seems odd that Peter Morgan has chosen to end The Crown, which returns this week, in the mid-00s, thereby missing out a bonanza of royal plot points. He has, after all, spent five seasons spinning gold out of the familiar and the tangential, and at times you felt the material strain ever so slightly: an entire episode on Mohamed Al-Fayed, Dodi Fayed’s father; stretches that are just deer drinking from streams or Anne showjumping; and an appearance, coming up soon, of the ghost of Diana.
But how rich in drama the past two decades have been! The show will end, for example, before Meghan and Harry emerge, a duo that could quite easily sustain an entire season alone. It will miss two royal weddings, phone hacking and the succession, as supervised by Liz Truss. And think what Morgan could have done with Prince Andrew’s fateful Newsnight interview (I would like to watch the scene in which he decides to accept the invitation, encouraged – or not – by his aides).
