Does anyone not know it’s a drama?
Culture secretary Oliver Dowden has said hit Netflix drama The Crown should come with a warning that it’s fiction, not fact.
Yes, the show based on real life events that chronicles the events of the British Royal Family throughout the generations, with Olivia Colman currently playing the role of Queen Elizabeth II in seasons three and four.
People need to be reminded that it’s not a completely factual account of events, apparently.
“I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact,” Oliver Dowden told the Mail on Sunday.
Describing the show as a “beautifully produced work of fiction”, Dowden said it “should be very clear at the beginning it is just that.”
Season four of the Crown has come in for criticism from royalists for its depiction of the breakdown in Prince’s Charles and the late Princess Diana’s marriage.
Diana’s brother Earl Spencer told ITVÂ “it would help The Crown an enormous amount if, at the beginning of each episode, it stated that: ‘This isn’t true but it is based around some real events’.”
The show’s creator Peter Morgan described the show as “an act of creative imagination” and has been praised by the cast for his method of producing the show based on real life events.
Actor Josh O’Connor, who plays Prince Charles in the current series, told BBC Breakfast: “What Peter does so brilliantly is he takes the historical facts… and then paints in between those ‘punctuation moments’.”
“Sometimes people will want to believe this is what happened. It’s always worth checking in and remembering that we’re actors, we’re not real and it’s not a real story,” he added.
Former Buckingham Palace press secretary Dickie Arbiter takes a less sympathetic stance, calling the show “a hatchet shop on Prince Charles and a bit of a hatchet job on Princess Diana.”
I haven’t watched any of it, and probably never will, but it astounds me that people need to be reminded that it won’t be factually correct to the exact detail of every private conversation. Can you imagine how dull that would be?
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