Joy Behar, one of the hosts of ABC talk showThe View, has challenged Dame Judi Dench’s claim that the new series of Netflix’s royal family drama The Crown should come with a disclaimer regarding its historical accuracy.
“This dame disagrees with Dame Judi Dench, because they tell you at the top that it is not a documentary, and if you have a brain, you can figure out that the writers have used history,” Behar said during an episode on Thursday 20 October.
“If it’s documented history, then we can believe it,” added Behar, “but we’re not going to believe a conversation that’s going on in the bedroom of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.
“Nobody was there but the two of them, so you don’t believe that part. But the historical part, you believe.”
Earlier this week, Dench, 87, had written a letter to The Times, in which she accused the series of “crude sensationalism”.
“The closer the drama comes to our present times, the more freely it seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism,” she wrote.
Behar’s The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg was more supportive of Dench’s view, pointing to a plotline about Prince Philip (played by Jonathan Pryce) having an affair that reportedly did not actually happen. Behar joked: “He had several affairs, apparently, but not this one.”
Dench is not alone in thinking that The Crown should come with a disclaimer. Helena Bonham Carter, who played Princess Margaret in the series, said in a 2020 interview that there is a distinction between “our version” and the “real version” of royal history.
“It is dramatised,” she said. “I do feel very strongly, because I think we have a moral responsibility to say, ‘Hang on guys, this is not… it’s not a drama-doc, we’re making a drama.’ So they are two different entities.”
Meanwhile, some fans of the series believe that Dench’s criticisms of the show have been motivated by her friendship with King Charles and the Queen Consort, Camilla Parker Bowles.
