The Crown
Seeing a reference to Claire Foy in Bob Tickler’s rant sorry crafted piece inspired me to watch the series The Crown on Netflix. This proved to be no easy matter. Netflix appears in the Home Page after the TV switches on and then disappears. My wife Gail and I had various attempts at scrolling and at the menu without success to refind it. Eventually using a handset control that emits a light we chased the Netflix icon around the screens and bingo we were there.
The cast is a strong one. Claire Foy is reunited with Ben Miles for the third time as they have starred together in Pulse and The Promise. Alec Jennings one of our very best actors plays Edward VIII and Eileen Atkins, who is incapable of a bad performance, Queen Mary. The early episodes revolve round the young Princess and the early ascent to the throne following the untimely death of George VI. In accordance with the modern trend where woman are depicted as feisty in roles of authority the young Queen soon asserts herself and exploits Churchill’s political weakness as the Conservative party wanted to replace him with the younger Anthony Eden.
With The Queen and The Audience the reign of Elizabeth is well-tramelled territory. The locations shots of Kenya which Elizabeth and Philip were visiting when her father died, Buckingham Palace and country shooting scenes were lush. Netflix has the budget to do these. It is departure from the Netflix formula of sex, politics and graft but achieved a success under the trusted direction of Peter Morgan who has some experience in this field with The Queen and other historical films like Frost /Nixon, Rush and the Damned United.
I have to admit like many a Ruster I am not a late night bird and after a full glass of Bordeaux accompanied by chopped liver on toast I was in the land of nod come episode three. None the less Gail was enthralled by it. If I had a criticism it was that I could not envisage Claire Foy as the young Queen. She got the accent but – in my opinion – not the persona as I doubted if she was quite as scheming and in reality she would more controlled by her advisors. Matt Smith played the Duke of Edinburgh as a young blood which they say he and his cousin the Marquis of Milford Haven were.
With the cost of films so great it is hardly surprising to see Sony move into this form of co-production. They have exploited a gap into market between a much-panned film which craters in release and the efforts of the terrestrials to produce costume or period drama. They have the bucks to throw at it but production values were not sacrificed. It is definitely the way screen drama is going.