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The Crown, season 6 episode 2, Two Photographs, review: doesn't let the facts get in the way
In order to tell one of the most famous royal stories ever, Peter Morgan resorts to fiction – and sometimes it's surprisingly effective
- Warning: this review contains spoilers
This episode of The Crown is titled Two Photographs, which is confusing. For starters, there are 78 photographs of Diana and Dodi on the al-Fayed yacht, sharing a kiss that was splashed across the world’s front pages in August 1997.
According to the drama, these photographs were orchestrated by Mohammed al-Fayed, who wanted the romance between the pair to be as public as possible. First, he tries to establish the exact nature of that romance by phoning the staff on board and requesting the salacious details.
“Are they sleeping together?” he asks an embarrassed security guard. Failing to elicit an answer, he demands to speak to the maid. “I want you to tell me if Mr Dodi and the Princess are intimate. You know the question I’m asking.” Told that they’re sharing a bedroom, he puts down the phone and tells his secretary to find him “the best photographer in the Mediterranean”.
That photographer is Mario Brenna, a slick Italian paparazzo played by the always watchable Enzo Cilenti. This series contains precious little fun but Brenna is the closest we get to it, providing a splash of colour as he zips around in his red sports car and boasts about his talents.
Then we meet his polar opposite: Duncan Muir, a staid Scot whose bread-and-butter work is traditional portraiture – weddings, graduations – in a village near Balmoral, but who also snaps the royals when they’re nearby and speaks of the Queen with awed admiration. When Palace PR men get wind of the Diana and Dodi yacht pics – which end up derailing her landmine charity work – they decide to launch a counter-offensive by hiring Muir to snap Charles, William and Harry enjoying their Scottish break.
Now, this is odd because Duncan Muir doesn’t exist. The Balmoral pictures do, but they were taken by the usual Fleet Street pack at a photocall. Why construct a fake character to make the point that Buckingham Palace was engaged in a dirty PR war against Diana? Could it be that the war wasn’t actually being waged? Still, it’s a neat way into the narrative, and the type of thing that The Crown has tried before: in series five, the Panorama interview was framed as a power struggle between rival BBC bosses. It provides a structure, and as a result this is the most successful of the four episodes released.
The invention of Muir does make one wonder, though, why Morgan feels the need to invent anything when covering one of the biggest royal stories of the century. Does he not have enough material to work with? Presumably he’s hamstrung by the fact that so many details of this period are already in the public domain.
Also an invention: what will turn out to be the last meeting between Diana and Charles. They part on a positive note, agreeing to be “brilliant at divorce” for the sake of the children, despite being terrible at marriage. It’s a tender moment, and maybe an exercise in wishful thinking.