In a news cycle where the separation of fact and fiction grows increasingly impossible and “you couldn’t make it up” is the standard reaction to every new headline, Dame Judi Dench scored a small victory for truth last week by obliging the streaming giant Netflix to acknowledge that, actually, sometimes you can and do make it up. In a letter to the Times, Dench accused Netflix of misleading viewers of its royal drama The Crown by failing to warn that it’s not “wholly true”. A disclaimer was subsequently added to the new season trailer, stating that the show is a “fictional dramatisation”, “inspired by real events”.
Dench’s objection was that the series, created by Peter Morgan, “seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism”. Someone, not unreasonably, pointed out on Twitter that this was the same Judi Dench who’d won an Oscar for her portrayal of another Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love, a film that imagined the greatest dramatist ever to grace the English language capering around like a Terry Jones-style female impersonator while struggling to finish a play called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter.
