To think that Charles and Camila are actually an example of genuine love

[Noddyandbiggerears]

Yes of course I feel sorry for Diana. Yes I think being a royal has a huge impact. But they let young and are now still together and seemingly happy in their 70’s, despite a lot of shunning, negative press, etc.

@Roussette

I do find it so odd that people really trash Camilla for having an affair with a married man when Diana did the same - with several

Blimey. You really despise Diana don't you? I am not a big fan but come on... she was 19 and his heart was elsewhere, you can't deny that

She was certainly not 19 when she started targeting other women's husbands.

Following with interest

Cygne not sure what you're saying here to me. I was talking about when she was 19 as you can see

I can understand the pressure put upon Charles to marry someone “suitable” and produce heirs. However, cannot understand why the situation with Camilla wasn’t discussed with Diana before the marriage. The situation and the pros (status and influence) and the cons ( acceptance of the situation). She could have made a decision and not been drawn into a contrived deceit.

But Happydays, I think it is not at all clear that Charles intended to carry on after his marriage - and pre-marriage, Camilla was apparently not the only girlfriend - and why would anyone like Diana ever have agreed to such a situation in the 1980s? Even a girl as young, silly and romantic as she was wouldn’t have accepted that deal.

Sorry, my bad.

Hmm I can't really say, maybe she has just embraced the 'flavour of the month' cause to try and make herself more popular?

I agree the Crown should come with a disclaimer

Not having Netflix I've never watched it, but why should it come with a disclaimer?
I realise folk can be fickle, but if they can't work out the difference between a dramatisation and real life there's little hope for them and they probably wouldn't notice a disclaimer anyway

It's a bit like Oliver Stone's "JFK", where some came to regard it almost as a documentary ... ridiculous

I understand why you would say that not having watched it, but I was expecting a dramatisation, nit this strange mixture of recreated events and completely fictional sections. Eg in the last episode I watched, Margaret discovered the institutionalised Bowes Lyon cousins in a cloak and dagger scenario - they certainly existed, poor things, but that never happened.

The series recreated some elements of the Australian tour very precisely down to outfits and backgrounds, but completely made up offensive statements by the Australian PM.

In my opinion, both were cruel and dishonourable in their behaviour.

'realise folk can be fickle, but if they can't work out the difference between a dramatisation and real life there's little hope for them and they probably wouldn't notice a disclaimer anyway'

It's because one minute it is factual complete with replica outfits, the next it's all made up bollocks. We know people are 'fickle', some seem to believe everything that is written in the tabloids but many of the people portrayed are all still alive. It seems grossly unfair to misrepresent so massively. As I said earlier I'm surprised that legally it's allowed.

@HappydaysArehere

I can understand the pressure put upon Charles to marry someone “suitable” and produce heirs. However, cannot understand why the situation with Camilla wasn’t discussed with Diana before the marriage. The situation and the pros (status and influence) and the cons ( acceptance of the situation). She could have made a decision and not been drawn into a contrived deceit.

You don't know it wasn't.

@Gremlinsateit

But Happydays, I think it is not at all clear that Charles intended to carry on after his marriage - and pre-marriage, Camilla was apparently not the only girlfriend - and why would anyone like Diana ever have agreed to such a situation in the 1980s? Even a girl as young, silly and romantic as she was wouldn’t have accepted that deal.

Why wouldn't she? (A) In dynastic families arranged marriage is for procreation. (B) a lot of women have always accepted that husbands play away. Those were not days of great feminist awareness. (C) people with personality issues do not always act in their own interests.

@Cygne

Eventually she tragically died young, all his fault as his actions were responsible for her turning into the person she was instead of the personality she should have been

Absolute nonsense, @Buryan. Nothing that Charles did to her forced her to get into a car driven by a drunk driver and fail to put her seatbelt on.

Or run round the palace off her head on coke with fergie as I remember was gossiped about a lot at the time.

Those were not days of great feminist awareness. Honestly this is such an insult to women of my age and older.

@derxa

Those were not days of great feminist awareness. Honestly this is such an insult to women of my age and older.

It certainly is. And completely inaccurate. Check out second wave feminism.

We have had 3 seasons of The Crown, without this much being made about declarations of dramatisation. I can only assume that s4 is cutting too close to the bone. There is also the undoing of PC & C's careful PR over the years when the series cures the public's amnesia , while making the millenniums dislike PC&C at the same time.

My guess is that they are bracing for s5 incase the series goes on about the questions and theories regarding Diana's death.

Ppl are aware it's dramatised and that is the norm with most of these shows. There is a mix of real and dramatised in shows like the Versace murder ( when we see the guy laughing in his car after killing for eg. it's clear no one else could have known that happened). But can ppl stop denying PC & C affair.

Infact, The Crown seems to have gone easy on the RF and glossed over and not covered some things we read over the years. Also, they did not cover when Diana threw herself down the stairs while pregnant nor her cutting/ hurting herself in front of PC, who cooly told her to stop with the dramatics (not exact words). All of this is according to Diana's own words. She also believed that the affair was carrying on - why else would PC wear those cufflinks or make that bracelet.

Lately, I also noticed they are going back to portraying Diana as mentally unstable and paranoid (someone on here even portrays her as some kind of cokehead?).

someone on here even portrays her as some kind of cokehead? Utterly despicable

We did have feminism back in those distant dark prehistoric days of the 80s, strange as it may seem, and it wasn’t choice feminism either

@derxa, I am a woman of your age and older. I was stuck in hospital during that royal wedding having my wisdom teeth out, and because I'd they had nowhere to put me on the NHS ward I got placed in a room with a private patient who watched the whole thing from beginning to end. I was a radical feminist separatist at the time and was appalled at the patriarchal nonsense that was that wedding and what I perceived as the lamb to the slaughter that was Diana. The only people who agreed with me were other radical feminists, of whom there really were very few.
Don't forget this was the era of Benny Hill, June & Terry, page 3 girls open on the bus and tube and in cafes wherever you looked, when rape in marriage was wholly lawful and when the police could describe some of the Yorkshire Ripper's victims as innocent. Geoffrey Archer's wife, a Cambridge professor, did not leave him for his flagrantly dishonourable, multi-infidelity conduct. Nor did most well off women because, and you may not know this, it was still the case that when property was divided on divorce, women got at maximum a third of the joint wealth -- if at all. When parents separated, the man got what was called "custody" ie the parental right to decision make, and the woman got "care and control", ie the work. Maternity leave and free universal childcare were still often merely aspirations. Agony aunts in women's magazines would routinely advise cuckolded women to grin and bear it for the children's sake. We have come some way to combat some of that but I can assure you that the world that Diana was in was totally dominated by sexism. She was a debutante girl in rich aristocratic society. I went to one of the most famous all-girl schools in the land where a number of these girls were sent. Now that school was highly intellectually aspirational but I still remember our head governor sharing the podium with Margaret Thatcher at a big centenary celebration and saying to the hall full of really clever girls, that the greatest achievement they would have in life was a ring on their finger. Now Margaret Thatcher, of all people, did not say a word. She did not challenge him. I can still see the headmistress' ashen face after all she had done to give us girls aspirations and then this face of patriarchy does this to us.
What, thinking about the time, was interesting about the public's love of the Charles-Di romance at the start was that only a teeny weeny number of voices ever pointed out that the age gap seemed a bit wrong. It took way down the line before Bea Campbell wrote her book on how Di was from a feminist perspective the victim of dynastic domestic abuse. That certainly was not obvious to the woman in the street at the time (and I also remember people being appalled at women calling women women then, it had to be ladies to be polite).
No, people were hypnotised by the fairy tale and for anyone to suggest that a silly debutante girl with a father who treated her as a heifer (discussed further up thread so I am not being gratuitously rude here) would have had a feminist thought about the nature of marriage and whether she should refuse fame, fortune and the world stage just to continue being a deb and marry some merchant banker then stop working at her little Kensington job, is just anachronous. She was reared for this sort of life and she got lucky with her suitor. There would always have been a dull little suitor in her tea leaves for her dull little future, and to expect her to have the agency of someone like Madonna or Beyonce is just expecting too much independence of thought for her.

Well Plumbuddle I respect your position with that additional context, but I do disagree that only a handful of women had issues with the marriage at the time, and I also sincerely doubt that Diana, or other women of her age and background, would have gone into such an arrangement with her eyes open.

Appreciate it, @Gremlinsateit. At the time I felt that Diana did not have her eyes open but then no-one at that age does. What I'm disputing is that had someone told her that this was the future she faced, she would have had either the consciousness or the ability to say no. After all we are all warned about parenthood lol! And we still undertake it. At that age and perhaps at any age, the power of self-delusion or optimism and hope that life will be different for me, is overwhleming.

That is true and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she had thought “he has a past or he fancies x (and y) but I Can Change Him through the Power of Lerv”, but we do differ on whether she would have accepted a proposal based on an open declaration that he would have ongoing affairs.

someone on here even portrays her as some kind of cokehead? well, we don’t know that she wasn’t do we? It was certainly suggested back then. And given people seem to believe everything they read about the rest of them e.g. Charles and camilla live separate lives because they can’t divorce, William has had an affair with Rosa whatever her name is and he must be true because the tabloids said so? Why can’t it be true that Diana did coke? She certainly shagged plenty of other women’s husbands, which puts her in the same bracket as Camilla anyway.

No, people were hypnotised by the fairy tale and for anyone to suggest that a silly debutante girl with a father who treated her as a heifer (discussed further up thread so I am not being gratuitously rude here But I explained the 'heifer' business upthread. It's rather nasty of you to call Diana 'a silly debutante girl'. If she had been merely that then she would have just put up with the whole Charles/Camilla situation and she would have been happy to walk in Charles' shadow. It came as a shock to the Royal Family how non compliant Diana was.
The papers might have tried to portray the wedding as a 'fairy tale' because of Robert Runcie's words at the ceremony. The BBC as usual showed street parties. Here in Scotland I think we saw the marriage of two rather frumpish people which was nothing much to do with us up here

No, people were hypnotised by the fairy tale and for anyone to suggest that a silly debutante girl with a father who treated her as a heifer (discussed further up thread so I am not being gratuitously rude here) would have had a feminist thought about the nature of marriage and whether she should refuse fame, fortune and the world stage just to continue being a deb and marry some merchant banker then stop working at her little Kensington job, is just anachronous. She was reared for this sort of life and she got lucky with her suitor.

Yeah I agree. For a pretty aristocratic girl with little education in the late 1970s, marrying well was really the only 'career' option available. If it hadn't been Charles, it would have been some other upper-class dude who would likely also cheat on her. So why not become Princess of Wales and potentially Her Majesty the Queen instead of wife of some minor aristocrat in some draughty country estate?

If Diana were a young woman now, she'd probably be like her niece Kitty Spencer and using her looks and height to snag a modelling or acting career. But in the 1970s, marriage really was her only option, so she might as well get a crown as part of the deal.