The Crown S6: the challenges of telling the story of living royals

Most of the information about the crash did not come out until 2008, when Operation Paget [the Metropolitan Police inquiry established in 2004 to investigate conspiracy theories surrounding Diana’s death] was published. All of a sudden, you could rebuild that entire summer through very credible testimony from close friends, bodyguards and the Ritz staff who went with Dodi to buy the ring that we feature in the series.

We needed those 10 years of investigations to get to the fundamental material with which to build our story. If we had stopped in 1997, and used only resources from then, pretty much what you would have been stuck with is the emotional responses to a moment in history, because that’s all we had at the time. But nobody had quite figured out truly what had happened, and what Diana was feeling about Dodi.

I think sometimes collective memory can be a harder thing to deal with when it comes to the monarchy, because they don’t often do interviews themselves. We get most of our information from newspapers, vox pops, and the public at large – but that is not how you attempt to piece together history.

This is one of the reasons why our show stops in 2005. You need to allow time for the true story of those moments to emerge. If we were still depicting the story up to 2023, we would only have today’s newspapers or interviews to help us shape the narrative.

Why do you think the royal family are fair game for portrayal on programmes such as The Crown?

I believe that in any democracy – which we have in the UK, even though it is a constitutional monarchy – we have the right to interrogate our public institutions, and the monarchy is a public institution. I find it interesting that nobody has a problem with us depicting Harold Wilson, John Major or Margaret Thatcher, yet some people feel that the royal family are untouchable. I simply don’t believe that’s true. If these two spheres of power are meant to function together, then we have to treat them equally.

• Read more | How should history remember Margaret Thatcher?

I feel a great responsibility to understand those people as well as I possibly can. But where that’s taken is not up to me – I’m not the writer of the show – but it’s my job to feel that I’ve left an impression of a person as rooted in history as possible. That’s hard, because it’s not just history – it’s perspective. But it’s rooted in as much information as we can gather and confidently put forward.

The show takes us into Downing Street at various points across the 20th and 21st centuries. How do you go about reconstructing life and events behind those closed doors?

The National Archives holds cabinet agendas and minutes, so we know exactly what was covered in every cabinet meeting. And lots of people who worked as cabinet members or civil servants within Downing Street have written memoirs or published diaries – they’ve gone home that night and written about what happened. During Tony Blair’s time as prime minister, [Downing Street press secretary and, later, director of communications and strategy] Alastair Campbell took unbelievable notes about every day that he was at Downing Street. Earlier, you had Bernard Donoughue [who published diaries spanning several Labour governments] and others. A lot of PMs write autobiographies, and a lot of historians write well-vetted biographies.

The reporting of government has a less gossipy nature [than some other media coverage]. So you might say, well, we know The Guardian will always slant this way, and The Daily Telegraph will slant that way. But whatever the outlet, you can trust an official account that says, for example, this many items have been presented for the budget.

The variety of characters and storylines portrayed in The Crown is one of the elements that’s allowed people to connect with the series. Do you have a favourite you’d like viewers to think about more closely?

If I had to choose a favourite episode, it would be that in which Charles goes to Aberystwyth University [in 1969, to learn Welsh ahead of his investiture as Prince of Wales], exploring his relationship with his Welsh tutor, Edward Millward. We were fortunate to speak to Edward’s daughter, who acted as a conduit to him – he was very ill at the time we were researching.

More broadly, that episode looked at the dangers Charles was facing during a Welsh militant bombing campaign. There were accounts that he was given a bulletproof vest to wear underneath his investiture uniform, because the threat of assassination was so high. However, we realised that the real story wasn’t about the outside political forces on Charles, but about his evolution under the tutelage of someone with whom he had a new kind of dynamic. It became such a simple story about a young man’s growth and awakening.
Those scenes where he’s with the Millwards highlight the family life he wished he’d had – that closeness – and the sense of isolation he experienced back home. It was such a simple, beautiful story, and we could never have got anywhere near that depth without the Millward family’s help.

Are there any historical details that captured your interest but were left on the cutting room floor?

Lots of small things that we spent hours researching didn’t make the final edit, or were simply brushed past in a scene.

I spent a lot of time checking which medals the tribal leaders wore when Elizabeth landed in Kenya in 1952, for example, trying to figure out how this religious leader of Zanzibar got a [particular] medal. And then, by the time it was actually filmed, it was just a flash-in-the-pan moment.

I don’t think I’d have been able to look up the way in which two posh people would have eaten asparagus in 1992

In one scene, Dominic West [the actor who plays Charles in the final two seasons] was eating asparagus at Highgrove. Our amazing etiquette adviser, David Rankin Hunt, stopped him and said: posh people don’t eat asparagus with knives and forks – they use their fingers. So we reset and reshot it with Dom picking up the asparagus with his fingers. It’s important to have so many voices who can chime in with their experience, because I don’t think I would have been able to look up the way in which two posh people would have eaten asparagus back in 1992.

Finally, could you share your sense of the place of history as drama in 2023?

If done correctly, it’s incredibly elucidating. It’s not journalism, it’s not on-the-ground reporting – but it’s how we digest our past to help us understand the moment we’re in, or where we’re going.

It’s really important to have creative freedom when you’re making historical drama, because I fundamentally think that – in the same way that Hilary Mantel said in her Reith Lectures – history has long been about a very small percentage of the population written by an even smaller percentage of the population. It’s about aligning perspectives to try to build a picture, and it’s a lot more subjective than people are willing to acknowledge.

As an example, the Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945. That’s a concrete fact – but how victorious Britain felt at that time, or how individuals in the war felt, all of that is perspective. So I wish a show such as this was taken less as docu- mentary and more as a way to help us process the people in our lives about whom we actually don’t know very much, but who are in positions of power, and as a way to try to humanise them and our history.

Annie Sulzberger is head of research for The Crown. The final episodes of the series are available to watch on Netflix from 14 December