20231116 Royals
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00:00 I'm Marina Lisht, I'm Associate Editor of NationalWorld.com and I'm with Tom Morton,
00:04 Early Editor of NationalWorld.com and we're going to be talking about the monarchy in general
00:09 because I can't wait to watch The Crown season six tonight and we're just going to have a chat
00:15 about our views on the monarchy but more specifically not necessarily about the show
00:21 but how monarchy, how we perceived it back in the 1990s which seems a long way away now.
00:29 So Tom, I don't know if you want to kick off with giving your sort of thoughts on it.
00:34 Yeah, thank you. We were discussing The Crown in our news meeting this morning and there was a lot
00:40 of excitement among people who would be watching it tonight as it's been released this morning.
00:45 I'm completely the opposite, I go the opposite way. I feel I came of age in the 1990s in terms
00:52 of what came of consciousness in the 90s. I started reading newspapers, started watching
00:56 the television news properly and I feel scarred for life by the actions and the attitudes of the
01:02 monarchy back then and it's going to take a long time for me to get excited by them or even want
01:07 to watch it, even a fun documentary about them. You cannot but feel sympathy for Princess Diana,
01:17 it's a tragedy what happened to her obviously, on a human level you can't possibly get angry
01:25 like that. But for most of the 90s what a lot of people seem to forget is that the monarchy just
01:31 played out as a soap opera in front of our eyes, which even without wanting to sound overly
01:38 patriotic and flag-waving, they were just an embarrassment to the country and really difficult
01:44 to defend I felt, even as a callow teenager. I don't know if you felt that as well Marina or
01:49 whether you've sort of felt more affinity towards them or not? No, I think I agree with you to a
01:56 larger extent Tom in the fact that I was fascinated, I just sort of wasn't put off by
02:03 the monarchy, I was fascinated by what was going on but I agree with you that it was a soap opera
02:08 and a lot of the people within that soap opera I wasn't necessarily a fan of. I did feel a great
02:16 degree of sympathy towards Princess Diana on many levels and I did admire her a lot and still do,
02:24 so that's why I'm particularly fascinated by The Crown and watching The Crown season six,
02:31 although I do find the idea of watching her final months, her final scene and the car crash,
02:39 I'm not looking forward to watching that at all. Yeah, I suppose it's going to be inevitable that
02:48 what happened to her then recasts a lot of what went before because she's now seen as a martyr
02:55 and she was seen as, you know, became the people's princess, obviously, through that beautifully
03:04 coined phrase, but because of that I think a lot of people forget what went before, that she was
03:13 manipulating everybody, you know, manipulating the media and in turn public opinion and in turn
03:20 trying to manipulate the royal family into her way of thinking. She was having photo shoots,
03:24 so there was that famous picture outside the Taj Mahal when she was off on a state visit with
03:29 Charles and she was pictured alone outside it deliberately to give the impression of being
03:35 isolated and in many ways you can't blame her for it because she probably was marginalised by a very
03:40 dysfunctional family, but equally, you know, she was a player in that game, she was tipping off
03:46 the paparazzi to take pictures of her leaving the gym just because she wanted to be the one to
03:50 control the narrative and again, from her point of view, better to control the narrative than not
03:54 to control the narrative, but from those of us watching and reading it just became so tiresome
04:01 on both sides and what a lot of people, I think, there was certainly this morning quite a lot of
04:09 mystified looks when the older ones amongst us were discussing previous generations or previous
04:17 years of the royal family and I don't think that they remember, or they've not even heard of,
04:23 the leaked tapes between Charles and Camilla and Britain and Diana and her lover Gilby which
04:31 just contained embarrassing language. Now, of course, they're private conversations, they
04:34 weren't meant to be leaked, but equally they documented, you know, the breakdown of a marriage
04:39 really. I don't know if anybody remembers, you know, Fergie caught on camera sucking the toes
04:45 of a Texan which is just astonishing really for a member of the royal family who could have been
04:53 the queen in the event of a few things going a different way and it was that that just, I just
04:59 feel turned off and I can't be turned back on again, certainly not yet, and I have no desire
05:04 to watch that craziness replayed as fiction or docudrama rather. I totally get what you're saying
05:13 and I did notice obviously the shock looks on the expressions of lots of journalists in our
05:19 call this morning and I do remember and do feel sort of experience the same feelings that you did
05:27 when I saw the photographs of Fergie and the toe photographs. So yes, I totally get what you're
05:36 saying from but in terms of finding it tiresome, I don't know whether I did, I was kind of fascinated
05:42 by it and I kind of sort of aligned myself more to Diana in the fact that I like the fact, yes,
05:50 I'm not denying obviously she was involved and there was the tipping off the photographs,
05:54 but I aligned myself to her and probably still do because I saw her as sort of the rebel,
06:00 the rebel of the royal family and sort of, you know, not doing what they were said and obviously
06:08 it was not necessarily payback but of course we can't forget how young she was when she was
06:14 thrust into the royal family and whether she was sort of more in tune as she got older and obviously
06:21 did tip the paparazzi off, she was only, I think she was only 19 when she married Charles and was,
06:28 I think, I would say pretty innocent at the time.
06:35 Yeah, I think there's almost like a Shakespearean tragedy to Diana's story because
06:41 this is obviously with the benefit of hindsight but when you do look at what happened to her,
06:47 you're right, she was 18 or 19 when she got married, there was that, again, with the benefit
06:54 of hindsight, horribly cringeworthy moment when Charles was asked whether he was in love with her
06:59 and he just replied, he wasn't, yes, whatever love is, which is a very unringing...
07:05 I was going to hear it in my head now.
07:06 Yeah, but then from that part on, you know, the narrative unfolds and you have,
07:13 it's not going to end well and it goes through public breakups and infidelity and
07:24 that, again, people now, people who aren't old enough will not understand how much the
07:30 Diana Panorama interview with Martin Baggier completely gripped the nation.
07:34 In the days when we only had a number of telechannels, you know, a handful of them,
07:40 when it felt like everybody was watching, I was at university, I remember that we had about 20
07:45 people in one person's room because hardly anybody had their own telly, all crammed around watching
07:50 it in silence, even though hardly any of us were monarchists by a long shot, nor staunch
07:56 republicans. It was just the only thing that was the order of the day and it did grip the country,
08:03 but it just, I say, it gripped the country, but to me, just not in a really healthy way.
08:09 It just, it was repackaged as entertainment and they did not behave well, they did not behave
08:16 as they should have done and that is, that's why I come back to just, it was bad enough as
08:22 entertainment at the time and I don't really want to see it as entertainment 30 years later either.
08:27 I think it would be interesting, I mean, obviously I'm going to watch it, but I think,
08:33 I know you don't want to, Tom, but it's almost like I would want you to watch it
08:37 to see whether your opinion changes or if in fact it just validates what you've been saying.
08:44 I think that would be, thanks for joining Tom and I today to talk about The Crown,
08:50 which I will be avidly watching tonight and do keep an eye on nationalworld.com for more opinion
08:56 and analysis on all different topics.
08:59 [BLANK_AUDIO]