The Crown is brilliant TV, so why all the fuss about the latest series? - Anthony Clavane

Season four of the award-winning Netflix show, which began last Sunday, chronicles the Princess Diana years. And the usual suspects aren’t happy.

The historian Simon Heffer called the hit series about the Royal family “a disgrace”. The Daily Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson claimed it depicted them “in an unkind, inaccurate way that will only provoke loathing in those who never knew them”.

According to the Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins, it is “reality hijacked as propaganda”. Charles’ friends, it was breathlessly reported in the Mail on Sunday, denounced it as “fiction presented as fact”.

The former Buckingham Palace press secretary Dickie Arbiter thought it was “a hatchet job” on the prince.

But, ever since the so-called War of the Waleses – as the tabloids labelled the Charles and Di saga back in the 1980s and 90s – there have been so many different, and conflicting, narratives to contend with.

It was billed, from the start, as a classic fairy tale. This was the narrative the Windsors themselves promoted. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl – and then, sadly, boy loses girl.

I have never been a massive monarchist. But I can remember being called into my newspaper office on August 31, 1997, the day Diana died following the car crash in a Paris tunnel,

to write an appreciation of the People’s Princess.

I might even have shed a tear or two (but don’t tell my republican friends).

The usual suspects – who tend, on the whole, to be pro-Charles and anti-Di – are outraged at the way The Crown seemingly plays fast and loose with the truth.

But this is a drama not a documentary. Clearly, there are a few inaccuracies, but the bigger picture still rings true. Peter Morgan’s bigger picture, that is.

As the creator of the series, and one of its key writers, Morgan has used his artistic licence to present one particular version of the story. So, off with his head!

This slightly hysterical reaction fails to acknowledge that creative freedom is integral to all great drama.

What about Shakespeare’s version of Richard III or Hilary Mantel’s take on Thomas Cromwell? Did Tolstoy distort the history of the Napoleonic era in War and Peace? In these classic works, the line between fiction and creative non-fiction is often blurred.

I’m not, of course, comparing The Crown to Wolf Hall. It’s soapy, sentimental and over-reliant on glamorous locations. The kind of escapist entertainment to see us through these long, dark nights of lockdown.

It boasts great acting, especially from Emma Corrin as Di. And well-structured plots, even if those of us who lived through the era know all the twists to come. And, let us not forget, superb shoulder pads.

Jenkins is not impressed. It’s fake history, he insists, and should be subject to regulation. “All we need is a simple icon in the top corner of the screen,” he writes. “It should read: F for fiction.”

That way madness lies. Should there be a new board of film censors? Should Shakespeare’s plays be fact-checked? Should the movie The Damned United give Leeds United fans a right of reply?

Those four words “written by Peter Morgan” are all that’s needed to alert viewers. Anyone who has watched his other films – Frost/Nixon, The Queen and The Last King

of Scotland – know what to expect.

But the critics want to send him to the tower. Even Michael Fagan has got in on the act.

You must remember Fagan. You know, that chap who entered the Queen’s bedroom. Yes, that Fagan. Tom Brooke, the actor who plays him in the show, is all wrong for the part, apparently.

“I’m actually better looking,” moaned the notorious palace intruder. “I’m sad they never thought to speak to me before they made this rubbish because the truth is a much better story.”

But what is the truth? Whatever your opinion on this episode, and indeed the entire, enthralling story of the Windsors, it will always be hard to decipher the fact from the fiction.

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