How much of the Netflix series The Crown has Alan Yentob seen, I wonder. When I interviewed him some years ago, my impression was that he doesn’t have much time for the watching of television: too many meetings to hold, too many people to meet. Either way, the BBC’s former creative director seems to be in a bit of a state about it. “That was going to come to the BBC,” he said in an interview, at once fluttering and defensive, which was published last week. “They wanted to go to the BBC and they knew the BBC couldn’t afford it all.” An idea to co-produce the drama had, he said, come to nought and so the glorious property went off to be anointed with oil elsewhere. “Netflix said, ‘We don’t need to share it. We will just do it.’ Now that is a world that is difficult.”
What Yentob meant – his “world” is not our world – was that it is difficult to compete financially with a company such as Netflix. Is this true? I suppose it is. Even if The Crown’s £100m budget has been exaggerated, there is no doubting the fact that its wallet is, for the time being, fat and wide open. Nevertheless, his comments read to me like so much buck-passing and not only because Peter Morgan, the writer of The Crown, has said only that the BBC “wavered” when he brought the idea to them (this, incidentally, is typical: weary writers and programme-makers everywhere will tell you that the BBC, paralysed by indecision and a certain left-over haughtiness, prefers a long and endless silence to the simple words “yes” and “no”).
What is perfectly obvious to the viewer seems somehow to have eluded Yentob and this is that The Crown’s lavish production design – £30,000 alone for a copy of the Queen’s wedding dress, a gown she paid for in 1947 with her clothing coupons – is the least of the reasons for its success.
Most of the series’ magnificence, and all of its considerable wit, is down to two things and two things alone. First, there is Morgan’s writing, which combines so brilliantly an exaggerated empathy for what I’m probably not allowed to call the royals’ plight with an uncanny ability to use half-truths (and even complete untruths) to achieve some (possibly dubious) higher veracity. Second, there are the performances, which are so dextrous as to be unnerving. Every time Claire Foy, aka HM the Queen, carefully places one hand over the wrist of the other, isn’t it as though some unseen person has opened a window behind you?
My hunch is that the BBC could very well have afforded these things – a great writer, some amazing actors – and simply done away with the 700 extras, the ever-shifting locations, the CGI required to enable the Duke of Edinburgh to face down a rogue elephant on his and Lilibet’s honeymoon. The thing would still have worked, and beautifully, too. The Crown is a historical soap opera, not Star Wars.
Yentob’s inference (“that is a world that is difficult”) was that Netflix is imperilling the BBC. This proposition, too, is distinctly lacking in perspective. Painful as it is to be kicked out of heaven – these days, Yentob is just (just!) another programme-maker, albeit one whose modish arts documentaries always get the green light – he mustn’t confuse his own plight with the BBC’s.
Netflix, of course, does not release its viewing figures; it doesn’t have to, given that it funds itself via a subscription model rather than with advertising. But when it comes to growing its subscriber base, it isn’t all plain sailing. In the second quarter of 2016, the numbers of new subscribers fell some way below expectations (just 1.7m net worldwide). In the third, it recovered, adding 3.57m, a figure it said was driven by excitement around its original content.
The trouble is, excitement isn’t something you can just go out and buy. Variety reported that Netflix believes Narcos, its drug cartel drama, and Stranger Things, its 1980s supernatural thriller, drew many of the new subscribers. But it had nothing to say about Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down, a show about the origins of hip-hop that was reportedly as expensive as The Crown to make, perhaps because it is thought to have been a flop. There are no official viewing figures for The Crown. But at least one entertainment website reports that, in the US at least, the numbers have been underwhelming (its opening weekend drew fewer than 500,000 viewers). This doesn’t surprise me. Like Mad Men, critically acclaimed but never popular, it is too singular to be a hit.
Watching the exquisitely crafted episode – almost a two-hander – in which Graham Sutherland (Stephen Dillane) painted his infamously sallow portrait of Churchill (John Lithgow), I felt I was watching a play, one that might thrill audiences at the National Theatre, but would never in a thousand years make it to Broadway or even the West End. I pay £5.99 a month for Netflix (except when I don’t, because I’m one of those who opt in depending on what’s on) and this seemed like good value at that moment. Still, this doesn’t make me typical. Some of my best friends remain unconvinced that The Crown isn’t just Hello! magazine in a Norman Hartnell frock.
If it’s this beauty and singularity that Yentob envies, well, that’s great – and perhaps his colleagues in drama will pick up some future series of The Crown when Netflix tires of the numbers (it is only fully committed to one more).
My guess, though, is that this isn’t the crux of his complaint, that what he really envies are Netflix budgets. Fair enough, I guess. Isn’t the point, though, that no one expects the BBC to compete with Netflix? What we’d really like is for the BBC to ape it, if only by showing a bit more courage and determination. It can afford to do this, not financially, but in the sense that it, too, does not need to play the ratings game (even if you wouldn’t know it sometimes). Faced with risk, it could say “yes” occasionally, and with conviction and enthusiasm; and failing that, it could say “no” and explain why and move on, swiftly.
It might also, now and then, deploy a little of the obvious pride Netflix has in the shows it makes. Why is it so nervous and weedy? If I were Yentob, I wouldn’t be telling a journalist a mournful little story about The Crown and how it got away. I would be praising to the high heavens shows such as Happy Valley, The A-Word and Fleabag; I would never stop going on about how covetous Netflix must be of the BBC’s talent, of all the things it can still do on such a relatively tiny budget.
