The Crown (Netflix) | Netflix.com
This Time Next Year (ITV) | ITV Hub
Arctic Live (BBC2) | iPlayer
We are in Buckingham Palace, or Buckingham as Americans will unaccountably insist on calling it, and the King is coughing blood, spattering the royal-appointment Armitage Shanks, just like a human.
I intended to hate The Crown, to wish it had turned out to be a 10-part analysis of dental prostheses. It wasn’t, and I’m rather glad to say so. After the (deserved) success of Victoria, there was still a reluctance on this sofa to sit through much more royal love. I didn’t have to. This, which begins in 1947, is about people, and politics: it is little less than the sharp and gorgeous and enthralling history of one of the most turbulent decades in our most turbulent of centuries. It is, I have to report, phenomenal.
I must have the statistics somewhere, but have probably spilt coffee or scrawled “didn’t know that. Hugely didn’t know that” over them: whatever, £100,000 or £100,000,000,000 (coffee grounds get everywhere), Netflix has spent record gadzillions on a winner planned to run over six seasons. With even a million, you would expect lush and lavish surroundings, and this doesn’t disappoint. But the genius lies in the credits.
Directed by Stephen Daldry, a script from Peter Morgan, it has Claire Foy and Matt Smith as the young Liz’n’Phil. Matt Smith is a revelation. Utterly shorn of his Tiggerish Doctor Who persona, he brings a handsome slab-faced truculence to his every moment as Phil the Greek. John Lithgow as Churchill – who’d have thought it would take an American to beat the Brits at the finest portrayal of the finest Brit, but I suppose we managed it in reverse with Lincoln (played by Daniel Day-Lewis). Princess Margaret is an incredibly foxy Vanessa Kirby, bearing a remarkable resemblance to a young Liz Taylor (as, almost, did the princess herself, before decanting herself into a bottle).
Above all Jared Harris as George VI. Awards await. Whether spewing with a stutter and much blood into the hard cold china of Sandringham, or coughing his way through a foggy shoot in Norfolk, in which the ducks stood as much chance as will Hillary in Wyoming, or loving his daughters – this was what he did best, and had only ever wanted to do, until so betrayed by his brother’s little penis – he kindly commands attention.
Now to Mrs Queen. The head that bears the crown. Claire Foy played it to perfection, in that she remains a cipher: as does, all these years on, our own Elizabeth.
Still not wholly convinced about the royal burden: in fact I am urgently unconvinced. At one stage the young Elizabeth asks of her coughing father, “Don’t you get sick of it all? And lonely?” George is surrounded, in various castles and palaces, by warm friends and family, and has to open and ignore a few boxes every morning before lackeys tie his bow and oil his feet into socks. Elizabeth on her honeymoon got to race around in a Riva, the sexiest boat ever imagined, and not over-angst about the overdraft, and it has been vaguely so ever since.
Yet I can finally feel sorry – a human, republican, sorry – for George’s staunch hatred of the fact he had to step up to such staunchness. The Christmas castle scenes are unbearably moving – a joke hat, In the Bleak Midwinter from the town choir, a recent diagnosis of cancer, a slipped tear. The night before he dies, a throaty misted performance of Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered with his increasingly voluptuous Margaret at the piano. Margaret herself, heartbroken, basically buggered by insane royal laws about divorce: died a joke, and that shouldn’t be allowed to be said of anyone.
It’s all paralleled by Nasser, Suez, end of empire, the snivelweasel Eden, the cold war, and all quite marvellous. So what if the nominal focus is on monarchy: they are simply people. Folk blame the media for “elevating” them to photo-fodder, and, my, there have been down the years some actionable and borderline insane accretions of red-top hagiography to which the only appropriate reaction would be a giant erection (as if there’s any other kind). But I blame the people. What are you all gawping at? Don’t you have lives?
It’s official: no one can gush quite like Davina McCall. Because she truly means the gush, believes it. No one can say “bundle of joy” with such breezy confidence in her ability to say it without retching. And, actually, This Time Next Year is a fine concept, surely soon to be rolled out worldwide: the trick is to film folk on the beginning of a “journey” – lose 10 stone, make a success of IVF – and then have them back in the studio, identical sofas, and pretend to us that some kind of time-travel jump cut has been made. It’s indubitably cheesy, and could only work with Davina. Miles Jupp or Richard Osman would struggle, carrying as they do the twin burdens of humour and self-awareness. But I defy anyone not to blub at the tale of one young man conquering his appalling stammer, and going back to his old school to speak in public. He got a standing ovation, and from this sofa too.
Arctic Live was much better than its predecessors, Stargazing Live and Volcano Live, in that it stood a minor chance of its cameras catching something actually doing something, like moving. Kate Humble, Simon Reeve and the wily Scots cameraman Gordon Buchanan were in Churchill, Canada, a grim town invaded annually by hungry polar bears waiting for the hunting-ice to freeze.
Reeve interviewed the stoic godforsaken locals with laconic wisdom. Kate, on the other hand, tore herself off from relaying Twitter questions of great banality (“Why are bears’ paws so big and hairy?” A scientist tried to hide his audible sigh) to serving up one of her very own. During an icy trampoline festival – the whalers have for decades used trampolines on deck to see further – she chose not to ask the question that I, and every 12-year-old, would have asked: how high could they bounce? How far did they see? Instead, there arrived such a BBC question: “Why is it so important to the community to carry on this tradition?”
Snaggletoothed, bemused Inuit grandma, gazing at Humble with a sudden if understandable lack of respect: “Because it’s part of our culture.” Kate beamed. Job done. Gordon continued to film polar bears, left the hotel to film dangerous polar bears, perhaps in the hope of being fatally mauled before going back to the hotel.
