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They’ve gone to great lengths to keep every detail of what will surely be The Crown’s most controversial scene under wraps, even transporting the replica of the car Princess Diana died in to Paris in secret, so that they could reconstruct her last journey there. But today (Monday) leaked pictures of the prop wreckage emerged, making a mockery of Netflix’s assertion last year that “the exact moment of the crash impact will not be shown”.
Now on set at Elstree studios – where some of the sixth season of The Crown has been filmed – the mangled S-Class Mercedes is a tragic sight, triggering memories in everyone old enough to remember the events of August 31 1997. Even to those who never met Diana, those memories feel deeply personal.
I remember being woken in the early hours by the phone: a journalist asking my father, a former Conservative MP, for a reaction. I remember the flags flying at half-mast, an old lady sobbing at a bus stop and the stillness of a London in shock. We all remember Tony Blair’s “People’s Princess” speech, the front pages that ensued, and the painful piecing together of Diana and Dodi Fayed’s final hours. Certainly, we’ll never forget the sight of those two neatly groomed boys walking behind their mother’s coffin.
If a shot of a mangled car can trigger all that in those of us who never knew Princess Diana, imagine what it must do to her sons, family and loved ones? To those of Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul, who died alongside her? Did the makers of The Crown take the time to do that?
After all, we know that The Crown’s makers have fertile imaginations. They were able, among other things, to conjure up a young Princess Margaret’s desire to be Queen, fabricate Prince Philip’s refusal to kneel in front of the Queen at her coronation, Prince Charles’s first meeting with Diana, the Princess warning her mother-in-law about the Panorama interview and a whole soap-style conversation between the late Queen and Charles, during her “annus horribilis”, in which the then prince tells his mother that “if we were an ordinary family and social services came to visit they would have thrown us into care and you into jail”.
Also there are the show’s “half-truths”, as the Queen Mother’s biographer William Shawcross describes them, all deliciously “encased in lace and velvet”. Because the series is undoubtedly a thing of beauty, a work of art, and its genius creator, Peter Morgan, has defended his manipulation of historical truth in the past. His job, he told The Hollywood Reporter four years ago, is to “join the dots, and that’s where the act of imagination comes in”. “But too often,” he admitted, “I get shocked when people say, ‘Oh! But when that happened’ and I go, ‘Well, no. Actually, I had to imagine that.’ ”
When it comes to Diana’s death, not much is left to the imagination. We already know far more than we should; more than is decent. Hundreds of photos of that car wreckage are still there online, should anyone wish to spend a macabre hour or two perusing them. In his interview with Anderson Cooper in January, Prince Harry even said although he wasn’t spared the sight of his mother “slumped on the back seat” after the crash, he remains grateful to have been shielded from some of the more gruesome pictures.
Consider the careful wording of Netflix’s statement, its promise not to show “the exact moment of the crash impact” – and how little that means if every other detail of the accident is to be ghoulishly recreated? To do that for the sake of entertainment goes beyond some of The Crown’s previous insensitivities, beyond “artistic licence”. It is rubbernecking, pure and simple.
Those who disagree will argue that the events of that day are historical fact: that filmmakers have always recreated national tragedies. The tragedy of war – most recently with the Oscar-winning All Quiet On The Western Front – of 9/11, of 7/7. But I would take equal issue with any depictions that are so heavily agenda-driven as to become distasteful; The Crown’s track record here is not good, and Diana’s death was above all a private tragedy.
All too often royal fetishism obliterates sensitivity, even basic human compassion. There’s too much relish in every tiny detail, which is paradoxically what makes The Crown the masterpiece that it is. We gorge on the array of artefacts laid out across Churchill’s desk, on the verisimilitude of Diana’s iconic off-the-shoulder black “revenge dress”. But when we’re talking about the crushed bonnet of that prop Mercedes, its smashed windscreen and buckled wheels? That’s when attention to detail goes from awe-inspiring to sick.
The Crown has thoroughly debased itself with Princess Diana’s car crash
The decision by the makers of the Netflix show goes beyond ‘artistic licence’ – it is rubbernecking, pure and simple