The next season of the Netflix series "The Crown" is in the starting blocks and again there are accusations that the makers are not taking the historical truth too seriously. A well-documented speech by the Queen is said to have been simply rewritten. The British tabloid is foaming.
The start of the fifth season of "The Crown" is getting closer and the allegations that the Netflix series has overdone it with artistic freedom are increasing almost daily. She deliberately puts the British royal family in a worse light. According to "The Sun", the latest chapter in this series of allegations concerns a well-documented speech by Queen Elizabeth II, which the monarch, who died in September, gave exactly 30 years ago.
In November 1992, just days after a fire wreaked havoc at Windsor Castle, the Queen addressed London's Guildhall. In it, she addressed some of the scandals that have spun around her family. She said, among other things, that the year that was coming to an end was one that she "would not look back on with unalloyed joy" and described it as "annus horribilis" – a "terrible year". However, she thanked for the support she and her husband Prince Philip had received.
According to "The Sun", however, an insider revealed that the series queen - now played by Imelda Staunton - will give a different speech. In it she would talk about "mistakes of the past", so openly admit them. In reality, however, this never happened, so the series openly "rewrites history".
"Netflix can argue about what happened or didn't happen behind closed doors to justify some of the storylines, but by changing the language, they basically rewrote the story," the outlet writes. This circumstance will "only contribute to the feeling that 'The Crown' takes great liberties with the truth".
Dame Judi Dench, among others, had already condemned the fact that the series makers did not take the historical accuracy very seriously. The 87-year-old recently wrote an open letter in which she described the series as "cruelly unfair". In the post, Dench also noted that as the series gets closer to the present day, the creators seem more willing to "blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism." She therefore demanded that a notice be shown before each episode clearly identifying "The Crown" as a fictional series.
