Watching The Crown must be a very strange experience for Liz the second. I mean, how could seeing a super intricate and intimate retelling of yours and your relatives’ lives not be? But while she’s reportedly been a fan of the two seasons that have aired to date, there was one episode in particular that upset and annoyed her. This was episode 9 of season 2, “Paterfamilias.” In my opinion, it’s the best episode of the second season and it depicts Prince Charles’ education at the cold, muddy and exceptionally grim Gordonstoun School in the north of Scotland.
We also get to see some of the marital strife between Matt Smith’s Prince Philip and Claire Foy’s Queen Elizabeth, with him wanting to toughen up the shy and reserved Charles by subjecting him to the brutal education that he considers made him a man, and her preferring the nearby Eton so she can keep an eye on him. Philip wins out and the young Charles heads off to a school that looks like something out of a Charles Dickens story (and was apparently last renovated in the Victorian era).
The thing that the (real-life) Elizabeth found so annoying was apparently how Phillip was portrayed, with a senior courtier reportedly telling The Daily Express the following:
“The Queen realises that many who watch The Crown take it as an accurate portrayal of the Royal Family and she cannot change that. She was particularly annoyed at a scene in which Philip has no sympathy for a plainly upset Charles while he is flying him home from Scotland. That simply did not happen.”
Well, there’s nothing stopping her sending some notes to Netflix explaining how they could be a little more accurate, right?
I should, at this point, say to take this entire story with a grain of salt, as it comes from The Daily Express, who churn out a daily dose of largely fictional rubbish about Princess Diana to their brain-dead octogenarian readership. Still, if The Queen does indeed watch and enjoy The Crown, that’s a pretty good seal of approval for it, despite whether or not she disliked this particular episode.