From Buckingham Palace to Schitt’s Creek

Call me quirky . . . I’ve been watching season four of The Crown, the starry Netflix series that delves into the public and private lives of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and her family. Once I’m done with each episode, I’ve been flipping to the amiable Canadian Schitt’s Creek, which swept up all the sitcom prizes at the recent Emmy celebration. The two series have not much in common, you say? True enough: one is a serious take on recent royal history, and the other is a comedic look at some fish-out-of-water Hollywood types who—having lost all their money—are forced to settle in a humble little burg full of outlandish characters. Different, right? And yet. . .

What The Crown teaches us about British royals is that they value the institution of monarchy above all. Love and family feelings are constantly being sacrificed to what’s seen as the good of the nation. This is particularly true in season four in which the Prince of Wales, deeply in love with the married Camilla Parker Bowles, is inexorably led into a marriage with the very young, very naive Diana Spencer. Still, the Windsors are none of them heartless, and they do feel concern about the personal happiness of family members. Moreover, no matter how much they disagree on matters great and small, they still feel a strong bond of kinship. This really shines forth in the “Fairytale” episode, in which both Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and (separately) Diana try to negotiate the tight family circle that gathers at Scotland’s Balmoral Castle to stalk elk and play silly parlor games. Whatever these royal folks think of one another, they’re kin, and always will be. And outsiders are not exactly welcome.

 The newly impoverished members of the Rose family, trying to carve out their own niche in Schitt’s Creek, are hardly royals, whatever they may think of themselves. But like the  British royal family, these former-zillionaires-in-exile are  usually oblivious to the wants and needs of the downhome folks around them. An air of condescension comes to them naturally, particularly in the case of family matriarch Moira Rose (Catherine O’Hara), a faded soap opera star still convinced of her own grandeur. For me Moira bears comparison to the hyper-snooty Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), in that she dislikes pretty much everything in her new home. By contrast, Moira’s husband Johnny (Eugene Levy, he of the highly expressive eyebrows) reminds me of the Queen herself. Like Elizabeth, he’s the glue that holds the family together, trying desperately to turn chaos into order and reassure the others of his love.  

 One of my favorite recent Crown episodes is “Fagan,” covering the real-life episode in which a troubled man broke into the Queen’s Buckingham Palace bedchamber for a heart-to-heart chat about the state of the nation. We don’t know what was actually said, but writer Peter Morgan  has given Olivia Colman, as Elizabeth, a marvelous degree of composure as she contends, from her bed, with the late-night intrusion of  unemployed house painter Michael Fagan, who uses her bathroom and asks for a cigarette. (“Filthy habit,” she mutters.) The episode is played off against Thatcher sending British troops off to war in the Falkland Islands. But I can imagine a similarly weird intrusion occurring on Schitt’s Creek, with some local Canadian derelict breaking into the shabby motel room that’s become home to the Rose family. Moira, I’m certain, would succumb to hysteria. Offspring David and Alexis would fight over who gets to sleep with the newcomer. And poor Johnny would just try to keep the peace. 

 

 

“The Crown”: It’s (Not So) Good to Be the Queen

If you have to commit to social isolation, Buckingham Palace might be the place to do it. After all, it’s very well decorated, there are plenty of loyal retainers on hand to attend to your every need, and if you are inclined to mope, you have many comfy corners to choose from. Running out of toilet paper is doubtless not a problem.  I trust Queen Elizabeth II, now  94 years old, is being duly cautious, sheltering herself from threats of COVID-19 either at Buck House or at one of her several other homes in England and Scotland. But she did emerge on April 5 (see below) to speak to the  people of the British commonwealth from Windsor Castle, urging Britons to stay strong in the face of global pandemic. Her warm, calm, sympathetic tone—far different from the bombast of various politicians familiar to us all—was widely praised. It seemed that in her sixty-seven years on the throne she has learned to bridge the gap between her royal self and her subjects., at least when the chips are down.

As I suffer through my own isolation right now, I’m binge-watching all three seasons of The Crown, the Netflix series that is astoundingly frank about the comings and goings of the British royal family. I have no way of knowing if all the scandalous details of this regal soap opera are portrayed accurately, if the love affairs, emotional kinks, and threatened coup d’états really happened in the ways they show up on screen. Still, I’m old enough to remember some of this from contemporary news reports,, like the Profumo scandal and all the sturm und drang involving Princess Margaret falling more than once for exactly the wrong guy.

The series also allows us to see the queen (Claire Foy in the early years, Olivia Colman later) slowly and sometimes painfully learning the tricks of her very particular trade.  If Queen Elizabeth has now mastered how to speak to her subjects, we’ve seen her (particularly in a long-ago address to striking Welsh miners) so detached from the lives of the working class that she rouses their hostility against her. And slightly later, when there’s an unspeakable tragedy involving children in another Welsh village, we’ve watched her struggling to appear sympathetic when her eyes are dry. As TV drama, it’s absolutely irresistible.

One detail that fascinates me about The Crown is the fact that in some ways it’s a TV drama about the impact of television on British royalty. It seems that when Elizabeth, then age 26, was crowned Queen in Westminster Abbey, she appointed her husband, Prince Philip, to the head of the committee working out the details of the coronation. For her this selection was mostly made to appease a restless spouse whose ego was suffering from all the veneration surrounding his wife. But Philip, bucking centuries of tradition, came up with some useful modern ideas. Prime among them was the concept of including Elizabeth’s subjects in the ceremony by putting the whole event on live television. This attempt at slightly democratizing the royal pomp and circumstance turned out to be a major p.r.. success story. But Philip’s later insistence (inspired in part by Jacqueline Kennedy’s televised White House tour) on a day-in-the-life documentary look at the royals at work would became a major embarrassment for all concerned. In any case, it’s clear that the whole royal family relies heavily on TV for their view of the outside world. Amid Buckingham Palace’s elegant sofas and tapestries, they gather around the box to watch Parliamentary election results and astronauts walking on the moon.

The Young Victoria: Royal Rebel

It’s not easy being queen. Nor, for that matter, making a film about the not-so-long-ago queen of a nation that’s very much connected to our own history. I became interested in Britain’s Queen Victoria when I recently toured Kensington Palace. No, I wasn’t invited to tea by Harry and Meghan. They do live in Kensington Palace, as do Prince William, Kate, and their brood. (Clearly, it’s a very big palace.) But the historic rooms of this London landmark have now been spruced up for tourists. I learned a lot about the lavish apartments of George II—ladies were admitted to inner-sanctum parties only if their dresses with sufficiently bouffant—and the far more austere ones of William and Mary. But the chief attraction is the childhood rooms of Queen Victoria, the centenary of whose birth is being celebrated this year.

The word “Victorian” is such a part of our language that we rarely stop to think about it. Queen Victoria, in our minds, is a plump old woman in severe black widow’s weeds, forever mourning the death of her consort decades before. We consider her prim to the point of stodginess, burdening her descendants with an obsolete moral code. But, as I learned at Kensington, Victoria was far more complicated than the dour widow we associate with the era that bears her name. Her father, the younger brother of King George IV, died when she was one year old. As her father’s brothers all lacked legitimate heirs (though there were illegitimate offspring aplenty), it quickly became clear that the young Victoria was in line to assume the throne of England. Her mother, a German princess, in tandem with the ambitious, domineering Sir John Conroy, kept her a virtual prisoner at Kensington. She was not allowed playmates or much in the way of intellectual stimulation; she shared a bedroom with her mother and -- when descending the stairs of the palace -- was required (even into her teens) to hold the hand of a lady-in-waiting. Sir John’s goal, if she were crowned before age eighteen, was for her mother to be declared regent, with himself as the power behind the throne.

Fortunately for English history, the elderly and ailing George IV survived until after Victoria had reached her eighteenth birthday. On June 20, 1837, she was awakened with the news that she had become Queen. Finally able to make her wishes known, she banished Conroy, freed herself from her mother’s grip, and started making her own decisions.  Naturally, various factions tried to control her choice of a marriage partner. She was barely eighteen, extremely sheltered, and seemed easy to manipulate. A German branch of her family contrived to introduce her to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and she was immediately smitten. Happily, so was he. They corresponded for several years (she even sent him a fetching “secret portrait” of herself with her hair undone and shoulders bare), but she had become savvy enough to postpone matrimony until she was secure on the British throne. Finally she proposed marriage—that’s what queens get to do—and by all accounts their relationship was a constructive and loving one, producing nine children and some valuable social programs.

A 2009 British film, The Young Victoria, stars Emily Blunt as the headstrong and frankly sensuous (and charming) queen. I watched it with pleasure, since it reproduced so much I had learned at Kensington Palace. But IMDB lists multiple complaints of tiny historical inaccuracies, like an incorrect placement of the Order of the Garter.  All those Anglophiles out there should really get a life.

Painted for Albert's Eyes Only