The Crown, season 6 episode 5, Willsmania, review: about as dry as the royal muesli
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The decision to split series six of The Crown (Netflix) into two batches makes little sense when you discover that it picks up exactly where it left off, just after Diana’s death. William is about to resume his studies at Eton. Relations with Charles are strained. The first line of dialogue reveals that Peter Morgan has all but given up. It’s from Charles, and he says – wait for it: “Would you like some of this muesli? It’s delicious.”
The episode is called Willsmania because, in tandem with William (Ed McVey) grieving for his mother and blaming his father for her death, he is becoming a teenage heartthrob. He returns to Eton and his Rory Stewart-lookalike housemaster to find a sack-load of fan mail in his room. Apparently, schoolgirls wrote to him saying such things as: “I am sure you will look really sexy when you become king and have a crown on your head. I bet you have a great body as you play so many sports.”
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Nothing happens in this episode of any consequence, and you will mostly spend it marvelling at the casting of Prince Harry, who should be a 13-year-old at this point but is played by 23-year-old Spud-from-Trainspotting lookalike Luther Ford. Harry’s function in this series is a sparring partner or sounding board to William, rather than an interesting character in his own right. One of the few conversations that rings entirely true in this final series is between the brothers. “How’s school?” “S--t.” “Same.”
Charles (Dominic West) is portrayed very sympathetically, as a dad desperate to do the right thing. He tries bonding over music – “Oh, I like this one,” he says, when he turns on the radio to Torn by Natalie Imbruglia – and visits William at Eton, but gets a very frosty response. Everything here is designed to make us feel sorry for Charles. On the telephone to Anne, she asks about William: “Does he have friends at school?” “Of course. What a question,” Charles replies, to which Anne shoots back: “Why? You didn’t.”
It all comes to a head when William blurts out that it’s Charles’s fault Diana was in Paris that night with Dodi al-Fayed and no royal protection officers. “You didn’t actually drive the car but you drove her into the arms of those who did by making her so unhappy… She still loved you and only wanted to be in the south of France so as not to be there when you threw a birthday party for The Other One.”
Who knows if this conversation ever took place – certainly not Morgan. It’s all neatly wrapped up by the end of the episode after the wise old Duke of Edinburgh intervenes. Jonathan Pryce can convey more with one glance than most actors can with 10 pages of dialogue, and there is a poignant moment when he looks back at old cine film of himself (in his Matt Smith days) with a young Charles. But it’s the younger cast who are set to dominate the second half of this series.
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