Diana’s portrayal in The Crown brings me back to my British childhood

When I started watching the Netflix drama The crown Four seasons ago, it was all history, honey. Despite being British, I personally felt as distant from the actual high-production game as probably most viewers around the world. But the last season, the show’s fourth, has been closer so far to bordering on my real life, and that has deepened my relationship with the show.

I am a Briton born in the late 80s, so the events currently taking place at The Crown are beginning to seem less fictional and more like the beginning of the events that shaped my first memories of “the news.” It has reached the point where the stories unfolding on screen are direct precursors to two events that dominated my childhood.

Though largely a subplot, the Northern Ireland conflict and Troubles loom large in the background of season 4 of The Crown. The show is about the murder of Lord Mountbatten and his relatives by the Irish Republican Army, foreshadowing many more tragedies that resulted from the conflict. One caught my attention.

In 1996, what had previously felt like a largely distant threat struck home when the IRA detonated a 1,500 kilogram truck bomb in central Manchester, just a few blocks from my father’s office. It was the largest bomb attack against Great Britain since World War II.

Just over a year later, the news came one Sunday morning that Princess Diana, as we still called her, had died in a car accident in Paris. My mother, who had been listening to the radio while enjoying a nice bath, burst through the door wrapped in a towel to break the news.

Remembering where you were when you learned of Princess Diana’s death is an experience shared by many Brits, but for me, when I was 9 years old, it was a wake-up call to some of the harsh realities of life. Some news happened, and I’m sure I was passively aware of it, but I found it predictable and boring. Here was something that was neither, and I remember feeling shocked to the core. He knew very little about death, but he knew that something was wrong with someone so young suddenly leaving.

For those of us who grew up in the North of England in the 90s, celebrities seemed to exist in an entirely different realm. Any famous person was little more than an idea, a mirage on a magazine page, as unreal as cartoon characters, children’s show hosts, and anyone else they shared my television screen with.

Diana was no different, and because she was gone before I became someone who could understand that celebrities are just people with full lives, she remained one-dimensional in my mind. Even as I watched on television how her children walked by her coffin through the streets and imagined the pain for their mother, she remained a mystery to me.

So far, I have felt that an important part of the puzzle was missing in my understanding of these early memories. But seeing Emma Corrin bring Diana to life in The Crown, highlighting how young she was, how difficult it must have been to live with an eating disorder while balancing motherhood and being a real wife, has helped me develop her in my mind.

I know that Diana’s portrayal of The Crown is sometimes fictitious and flawed, and I don’t run the risk of being misled into accepting Netflix’s version of her as gospel. But it has allowed me to better imagine her in my mind, to develop my own understanding of her as a person with hopes, dreams and desires of my own.

Now I see her not through the eyes of a shocked and protected girl, but as a woman looking at another and realizing that like all other women I know, she was complex and multifaceted and harbored a rich inner life beyond. of the face he had. presented to the world, a private side of her that ultimately was never and never will be ours to claim.

With season 5 of The Crown in the works, I know there is going to be another change in terms of my relationship with the show. There are tragedies to come that I know will thrill me when I look at them, but it also intrigues me to see how the history of my country that I witnessed as a child will see me through the lens of Netflix as another world. – wise adult.

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