Watching Season 6 of The Crown (first 4 episodes dropped 16 Nov).
It’s mostly about the crash – events leading up to, etc. – that killed Diana in Paris in 1997.
People don’t love it. Bad writing, they say. And insensitive, some of the others say, to the treatment of its subject.
But maybe it’s just a bad story told well (Elizabeth Debicki is brilliant, so the acting is not the problem. Not yet sure about whether the real Dodi was as pathetic as he comes across…). It’s not like any perfectly-executed version of the story involving a woman who was essentially sacrificed to the attention she commanded – while trying to escape it – can ever be “good”.
Still, the more thoughtful reviews remind us that we are likely biased by the competition with our own “living” memories of the people on the screen. My generation can remember where they were when she died as well as we can hearing the news of Prince. Hell, we watched her wedding on the telly. At the age of 6, all I remember hoping for her on that day in 1981 when people were gathered in my parents’ house to watch proceedings on a grainy screen was that she didn’t need to pee.
Before she died in 1997, Diana helped to turn a lot of eyeballs to landmines when she walked through a treacherous zone in Angola with cameras in tow. (We hope those photographing the event also made it through.)
That was also the year that the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and its founder, Jody Williams.
I visited Paris as my mother’s +1 for an ICBL conference not long after the other crash.
Spent a week walking the streets too sad to care about other people’s losses.
