London - Television series "The Crown"
might have won millions of fans across the globe with its
dramatisation of the life and reign of Britain's Queen Elizabeth
but one royal historian has accused it of peddling a subversive
republican message.
The third season of the hit Netflix show was released on
Sunday, portraying events around Elizabeth and her family from
the mid-1960s until 1977.
Its creator Peter Morgan has said the series, whose first
two seasons cost about $130 million to make, is based on known
facts and imagined private conversations.
However, royal historian Hugo Vickers has penned a book "The
Crown Dissected", to expose the fiction, saying the show
features ludicrous events, misrepresents characters and includes
some "idiotic scenes".
"What I like is fiction to help us to understand the truth
but not to pervert it and twist it around so you get a
completely false view about what happened," Vickers told
Reuters.
"I think there is a subtle subversive republican message. If
you want to find out more about that, go and look at what Peter
Morgan has been saying in order to promote the series. He's
quite rude about all of them."
Vickers, a passionate monarchist who has written numerous
books on the royals, said he was "not a pawn of Buckingham
Palace" but was concerned about the public believing that
everything it watched had really happened.
"It seeps into the psyche and people believe it to be true
and it isn't," he said.
The worst error so far, Vickers said, was the account of the
death of the sister of Elizabeth's husband Prince Philip, who
was killed with her family in an airplane crash in 1937. He said
parts of that account were "absolutely outrageous".
The drama series about the royals has recently been
overshadowed by intrigue surrounding the Windsors themselves.
Last month Prince Harry, the queen's grandson, and his wife
Meghan Markle began legal action against a national newspaper
over what they said was "bullying" by sections of the British
media.
In the last few days, Elizabeth's second son Prince Andrew
has dominated headlines after he gave an interview, described by
British media as a car crash, in which he denied accusations of
having sex with an underage girl.