There is an obvious answer to the objection that the upcoming series of The Crown contains an event that never happened: it’s a drama. Netflix has duly said so. But of course it’s not that simple. The Crown is strongly acted, full of complex characters and absorbing plots – yet also derives a great deal of its effect from hewing closely to the real lives of the British royal family, and an impression of privileged insight into it.
The cultural landscape is currently littered with similar blurrings, from This England, Michael Winterbottom’s dramatisation of the early days of the Covid crisis, to Impeachment, about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky; from Pam and Tommy, about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, to Maxine, about the Soham murders. Historical novels have been joined by autofiction. A play about the Rebekah Vardy/Coleen Rooney court case is on its way.
One strong defence of the use of real lives is that there are different kinds of truth. Robert Lacey, historical adviser on The Crown, maintains the show is half historically accurate and half imaginatively accurate. In her 2017 Reith lectures, Hilary Mantel argued that in death “we enter into fiction … Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted.” History is not the past, she observed, but “the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past”. Organisation makes it story. And story – always partial – can help us empathise or at least begin to understand.
Things become more complex when events are made up. John Major has attacked a scene in The Crown, in which Prince Charles reportedly lobbies him for the Queen’s abdication, as a “barrel-load of nonsense”. Yet the palace itself should take some responsibility. It obtained an absolute exemption from the Freedom of Information Act for papers relating to the sovereign and the second and third in line to the throne. “If scholars are unable to write an accurate history … the field will be left to dramatists and to those with vested interests in leaking information,” suggests the historian Prof Philip Murphy.
Matters are trickier, too, when subjects are still alive (though some argue that the dead, being unable to defend themselves, need extra care) and when there is misleading emphasis or a whiff of exploitation. However sympathetic the portrayal of Anderson in Pam and Tommy, the fact remains that – like the sale of the couple’s stolen sex tape, on which the drama focuses – she did not consent to it.
To tell a story is to take a kind of ownership, which is a kind of power; if that is misused, or not matched by the subject, the imbalance must be scrutinised. Power differentials depend on many things: who is doing the telling (and why, and what for) – and in what medium. Television has a vast potency. Even knowing that something is fiction does not prevent a certain effect, an effect made stronger, in fact, if the portrayal is well done. As the former royal reporter Jennie Bond has noted, even witnesses to actual events may doubt their own memories. Such power is a great attraction of this type of storytelling. It is also why it must be used with great responsibility and care.
