The viability of the British royal family - or any ruling class - is probably more dependent on its subjects' suspension of disbelief than any real sense of loyalty.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Like most relationships, it's contractual.
As long as the royals behave a certain way, dose us up with feelings of stability and security, we turn a blind eye to their pretentions of divine superiority, their taxpayer-funded entitlement and their icky baubles denoting obscene wealth and bloody colonialism.
The contract is broken when fact intrudes on fable (or whenever Andrew shows up).
The reason many of your colleagues have their eyeballs hanging out of their skulls today or have just gone AWOL from the office completely, is because all 10 episodes of season five of The Crown dropped on Netflix last night.
The series has always been addictive, yet, now, post-Elizabeth, it comes with an added sense of voyeurism and an unfamiliar layer of detraction for the streaming service itself.
Once the jewel in Netflix's cranial ring of power, the makers of what used to be called "the most expensive show in history" are now fending off accusations of peddling fiction for real-life events and claims of lese-majestic insensitivity.
When Dame Judi Dench demands a disclaimer, you know public opinion is not on your side.
Yes, the Queen's coffin only entered the royal vault six weeks ago, but perhaps that doesn't fully explain why we're feeling a little squeamish about the latest chapter of The Crown.
Perhaps it's more to do with dredging up bad memories?
Season five is set in the 1990s, the time when our suspension of disbelief regarding the Windsors took a battering. It was a time when the contract, if not broken, was damaged irreparably.
It was a messy divorce.
There could be no more grotesque collision of fact and fable than that inconceivable moment when Diana, the chimeric "'people's princess" lay bloody and dying in a crumpled BMW driven by a drunk.
The entire world watched with a hand over its mouth. Mother Teresa died a few days later, as if the canny old nun knew now was the time to slip out unnoticed.
Diana was often accused of undermining "The Firm" when she was alive, but it was her death (to be covered in the sixth and final season of The Crown) which did much of the damage, the last of a public train of events that began with her explosive interview with the BBC's Martin Bashir, the foundations of which have since been exposed as rotten and exploitative. It's not until episodes seven and eight of the current season that the Bashir interview is interrogated by The Crown but by then some may have had their fill of Diana as portrayed by Australia's Elizabeth Debicki; physically and vocally hers is an uncanny performance, yet one never far from caricature.
READ MORE:
Imelda Staunton's Elizabeth is restrained and sturdy (you still can't help but wish they just put some extra make-up on Olivia Coleman) but before we're introduced to our new queen, we're reacquainted with the old, young version, as Claire Foy reprises her role from series one, which first aired all the way back in 2016.
The opening of season five transports us to 1953, when Elizabeth, only 14 months into her new gig, is launching the royal yacht at Clydebank. From there, we fast-forward decades through the reign to 1991, when the Queen is dealing with public murmurings of irrelevancy as fuelled by Fleet Street at a time when its own institutionalised omnipotence was a good decade away from the first stirrings of democratised revolution.
It's through the black-and-white visage of Foy and her personal baptism of Britannia (a "floating, sea-going expression of me") we're reminded more of the easier-to-stomach fable of the royals than the harder-to-digest facts, and the moment serves as a strange, stylised bookend to the monarch's death here in the real world.
After a good binge, viewers will make up their own minds about whether accusations The Crown has strayed from sterling docudrama to dollar-shop soap opera are accurate or fair.
Regardless, there'll always be consumers of royal tales, real or invented, because it's part of the contract.
The emperor prances past in his new clothes and we applaud, pretending he isn't naked.
More from National
Twice weekly
Voice of Real Australia
Get real, Australia! Let the ACM network's editors and journalists bring you news and views from all over.
