 The British government have a lot on their plate right now. We have to get to the other side of winter with Covid still raging through the population while avoiding the same level of deaths we saw in spring. We are now only a month away from the end of the transition period. We will be leaving the EU deal or no deal on the 31st of December. But Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has still found time to focus on the issues that really matter. Yes, I'm talking about whether or not Netflix series The Crown has misrepresented Prince Charles and the Queen. This story relates to comments he made on Saturday when speaking to the male. Oliver Dowden last night demanded that Netflix make clear The Crown is fiction. In a dramatic intervention, the Culture Secretary added his voice to mounting concern that fabricated scenes in the drama series were so damaging to the royal family that viewers should be warned at the start of each episode that it was not fact. It's a beautifully produced work of fiction. So as with other TV productions, Netflix should be very clear at the beginning, it is just that he told the male on Sunday. Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact. There was also pushback from allies of Prince Charles. It comes amid deepening concern that fabricated scenes written by screenwriter Peter Morgan are doing lasting damage to the monarchy and Prince Charles in particular. Last night, a friend of the Prince said it is quite sinister the way that Morgan is clearly using light entertainment to drive a very overt Republican agenda and people just don't see it. They have been lured in over the first few series until they can see how they are being manipulated. I quite like that sort of conspiracy theory there from someone close to Prince Charles, which I mean he's kind of suggesting that the first free series of the crown were so good and agreeable just so in series four they could try and corrupt your opinion of Prince Charles. I imagine many of our viewers watch the crown. I'm currently halfway through series four. I know Ash has watched the whole thing. We can get some pictures up now in case you haven't. You can see their physical likeness. This is Prince Charles. He is portrayed very negatively on the whole in the series basically being shown as very egotistical, fairly disinterested in Princess Diana's well-being. This is Princess Diana whose physical likeness to Princess Diana is quite remarkable. She comes across as quite charming, which I suppose is to be imagined or to be expected. Ash, I want to go to you on this because I know you, I mean we both watched the crown but I feel like you have more expert knowledge than I do. Do you think it has been unfair to Prince Charles and do you think that Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary is right to take some time out in the middle of a pandemic? You might say he's culture secretary. He doesn't care about public health anyway. We do have an industry in crisis in this country because of lockdown and pandemic, so he should be doing other things for you. Let's go to that basic question. Is the crown unfair to Prince Charles? Well, first you've got a, I mean look this whole discussion is completely ridiculous because obviously it's fiction and I don't remember the brew ha ha around Peter Morgan's film The Queen starring of course Helen Mirren as the titular queen when it was depicting the days immediately following Princess Diana's death and it was depicting the queen as essentially emotionally overwhelmed by a situation which was completely at odds with what she'd been taught were the values of stoicism and duty and so on and so forth. There was actually positive noises coming out of Clarence House at that point and it's the same guy making this series and suddenly they've turned against him they say he's a closet republican all of this. The reason why and it's very simple is because this one season has completely undone the decades worth of PR put in by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, Charles and Camilla because the people who lived through the you know the Prince of Wales's divorce there were very clear binary goodies and baddies and partly that was because Princess Diana was a very adept player of the press. She did the Martin Bashir interview she gave an interview to Andrew Morton which became the documentary film in her own words and she spilt the tea and then you also had the notorious tampon gate so this was like a phone conversation between Charles and Camilla where he actually didn't mean it in a sexy way he was kind of being self-facing and weirdly jokey and he was saying oh just my luck you know I'd come back to earth as your tampon and you know be reincarnated as your tampon spend my day swirling around the U-bend so it was actually a bit more self-aware and jokey than that but you know there was pretty clear goodies and baddies even though Diana's infidelities became public knowledge Charles and Camilla were seen as you broke up the fairy tale couple you Camilla you're a scarlet woman you'd been carrying on with him when you were married yourself and all of this and in the years since Diana's death they really carefully built up a public image which which you know had moved away from that story quite significantly and the reason why this is important the reason why it's important to parking in palace that the crown is sort of undone this decade's worth of PR is because when Charles becomes king they don't know what they're going to do with Camilla right so she's divorced right and marrying a divorced woman it you know that's what caused the abdication way back in the 1930s they've sorted that bit out and they're go okay all right so you're going to be married to a king but unlike literally every other consort in history apart from the male consorts of a queen you're not going to be a queen consort you might be a princess consort or something like that they were going to try and work around it to you know avoid the sticky divorce issue and avoid riling up the public too much now with you know these these record-breaking numbers of people watching the crown that's how the window people are back in that sort of 1990s soap opera of Charles and Camilla bad now as to whether you know Peter Morgan was fair in that depiction or not you can see what he's used as his source material and particularly for the accounts of princess Diana's eating disorder Charles's responses to that you can see how he's really relied on you know the Andrew Morton book and other sources which have you know shown events very much from her point of view there was a war of briefing between the two of them but princess Diana was always able to win because she was the only one willing to put her face her name her voice to the account whereas other members of the royal family very famously you know would never never ever do that so i think that that's why the story is told in the way that it is i think another reason why the story is told in the way that it is which is a lot less you know the previous seasons of the crown i'm not sure if you watched all of them it presented Queen Elizabeth as essentially you know a good person who it struggles to do nothing but doing nothing is all she can do and she's got a kind of stuffy sense of duty but essentially she's all right in this season where where you know you've got the kind of speeding train of historical fiction colliding with our moral values as it gets closer to the present day you start to see the royal family is being not just you know outdated and not just having values which are incompatible with the modern world but are actively cruel cold destroying of of people their sensibilities in their inner lives and that's because there's no way around the fact that well yes that's the case you've got people whose lives have completely ruined because they're being shoved into these mismatched marriages why to maintain a system of unearned wealth and power which stretches back to William the conquerors basically your ancestor was the most successful thug of his day and now you get to be head of state so it inevitably becomes a less charitable depiction because you see how weird the social norms are within that family which maintain that fundamentally anti-democratic settlement so I'm not surprised that conservatives are annoyed about it but that's what has to happen if you want to have a drama depicting any of these people without simply becoming a kind of you know the Sophia Coppola Marie Antoinette where you become so enraptured by the glamour and the baroque and the gilding that you don't actually tell a social or a historical story anymore so I think it's the constraints of the form and I think it's a really good series the other person in the show or their depiction that has been pissing people off is Maggie Thatcher very entertaining in the show and I want to go back to a tweet which was tweeted by Tim Montgomery who's worked in Downing Street recently he was also a writer a conservative home but he was one of Boris Johnson's advisors so he tweets out I can't bear to watch any more of the crown and it's absurd hateful portrayal of Margaret Thatcher such a shame I was confused when I watched the first two episodes and saw that tweet because in the first two episodes she comes off really well because she's someone who's sort of against hereditary privilege she goes to meet the royals at Balmoral and she sort of thinks that they're all kind of stuck up elitists and she's a hard-working person who has worked for her success but when you do go later in the show she does you know obviously get portrayed in a more negative light some of it's true though I was watching the Maggie Thatcher documentary because one of the things that happens in the show is they say she you know she didn't really like her daughter or didn't like her daughter to the same extent as her son and in this documentary and it's another BBC documentary very good someone one of her private secretaries tells this anecdote of he went in to meet Maggie Thatcher to discuss whatever and he heard a little scuttling in a cupboard and so he says you know Maggie what's going on have you got rats in your cupboard and she was like oh no that's my daughter she was wearing jeans so because her daughter was wearing jeans she put her in the cupboard so you know obviously at Navarro Media we disagree with this woman's politics but she also seemed like a pretty goddamn strange individual my absolute favorite bit though of the male article is a comment from a Tory in a letter to Mr Dowd and Tory Lord Forsythe who describes the latest series of the crown as one step up from spitting image expressed surprise that Netflix pays no corporation tax as the one billion of UK subscriptions are paid to a Dutch company so this is the only way you can get Tories to care about tax evasion is get a tax avoiding company to speak badly of Prince Charles we need I suppose Amazon and Apple and all of these other mega corporations to start a little battle with the Royals to make any progress on that front