Everyone's talking about: Historical accuracy
Why are people so obsessed with it?
Are you still upset because critics have been rude about The Crown?
Yes! Who cares if the writer massaged royal reality a bit?
A bit? By episode four Diana was getting stuck in from beyond the grave.
And who’s to say that’s not what happened?
You appear to be making the case for a historically accurate ghost.
I’m just saying that some things are beyond human understanding.
You mean like in episode one where Diana drives to Chequers singing Chumbawamba?
Elizabeth Debicki as the revenant Princess Diana in The Crown
I mean the presence among us of beings from other realms.
OK, now you’re starting to sound like Ridley Scott.
I am?
The Napoleon director informed readers of London’s Evening Standard that we’ve been visited by aliens. ‘How did the Egyptians build the pyramids? Rolling 20-tonne stones on logs? F*** off!’
He may have a point.
Or a tenuous grip on reality.
Anyway, he shares my annoyance at historians banging on about accuracy.
His comments to their fraternity in The Sunday Times made that clear.
What did he say?
‘Excuse me…were you there? No? Well, shut the f*** up, then.’
I don’t agree with his swearing but what was the issue?
The authenticity of Marie Antoinette’s hair.
Well, like I said, he’s not a fan of historians.
Or the French.
Because they started the Napoleonic Wars?
Because French GQ was rude about his movie.
Joaquin Phoenix in Napoleon
What did they say about it?
‘Deeply clumsy’ and ‘unintentionally funny’.
What did he say about them?
‘The French,’ he bellowed to the BBC, ‘don’t even like themselves’.
You say historians are obsessed with getting the past right, but some directors are, too.
Who?
Stanley Kubrick (who back in the 1960s tried and failed to make a film about Napoleon) lost his set designer in a row over the era-appropriateness of rhododendrons.
I approve of his horticultural rigour.
But if everyone got their breeches in a bunch like that, we’d have lost some of cinema’s greatest moments.
Such as?
The barbed wire-jumping motorbike scene from The Great Escape, set in 1943.
Rhododendrons in the scenery?
No. As Ben Macintyre points out in The Times, that motorbike model wasn’t made until 1963.
I assume the Beckham documentary didn’t worry you either, then?
Um, no.
You’re fine with the footage of Victoria Beckham attending games at ‘Old Trafford’?
Why are you doing air quotes?
Because it wasn’t Old Trafford. It was Stamford Bridge!
Oh, OK.
As one online commentator pointed out, ‘That’s Chelsea… is Becks a time traveller?’
Maybe the editors should have built that in as a subplot.
It seems we can’t escape time-travelling celebrities.
I agree with Elizabeth Debicki (who plays The Crown’s Diana).
What did she say?
That including spectral versions of Dodi and Diana in the storyline constituted ‘an interesting and beautiful way to have a conversation about the experience of grief’.
In that case, let’s hope the writers have pulled out the stops for the final six episodes.
Landing in 11 days! Which stops are you talking about?
Well, if Diana can now time travel, then what’s to stop her rocking up in the present-day palace?
Brilliant!
While we’re at it, let’s have a spinoff series where she and Dodi go back in time to enliven the duller passages of English history.
Even better.
Jethro Tull’s invention of the seed drill in 1701, which you may recall led to the agricultural revolution, could do with sexing up.
Call the producers.
They’d be The Crown’s answer to Bill and Ted.
What would it be called?
Dodi & Di’s Excellent Adventure.
