Why The Crown rules: it transfigures myths and legends as superb soap opera

We can’t get enough of the real-lift soap opera that is the royal family.

Harry and Meghan Markle announce their engagement this week. Picture: Getty Images

It’s extraordinary the way life and entertainment go neck and neck with each other.

Just as everyone is limbering up for the second season of The Crown, Netflix’s sumptuous soap about the Queen and the royal family, Prince Harry makes everyone feel a bit better by getting engaged to Meghan Markle, who is not only American and divorced but has an African-American mother.

It’s all such a far cry from the Kensington Palace scandals. The Crown fans and people who know their biscuits when it comes to British history in general and the monarch in particular will recall that the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby in The Crown), was prevented from marrying the love of at least her earlier life, Group Captain Peter Townsend (Ben Miles).

The Townsend disappointment is associated in The Crown and in real life with what became a recurrent motif, the abdication of Edward VIII, played with a lot of dazzle and languid charm by Alex Jennings (Opera Australia’s Hen­ry Higgins in its revival of My Fair Lady). Edward VIII gave up the throne to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson and if he had not done so the Queen’s father, George VI, would never have become king and she would have had a much quieter life.

Well, no one seems at all deterred by the fact Markle — the 36-year-old who is set to become a duchess, they reckon, when Harry enters man’s estate by getting hitched (because Harry will almost certainly be given dukedom) — had been divorced. And people seem cheerful about the fact, in her light-skinned ambiguous way, she’s black.

Markle is humorous and self-mocking about the effect of her Obama-light looks on her career. As the actress, who is best known for her stint on Suits,wrote in Elle magazine in 2015: “I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones, leaving me somewhere in the middle as the ethnic chameleon who couldn’t book a job.”

That happens to be a pretty dazzlingly articulate remark for any putative member of the royal family, but it doesn’t change the remarkable fact a woman whose great-great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side had been a slave on a Georgian plantation until the end of the American civil war is to marry the brother of the future king of England.

The Australians of my father’s generation used to take satisfaction in referring to the Duke of Edinburgh as “Phil the Greek”, which was one kind of racist way of referring to the prince of the House of Battenberg who became the consort of the Queen. But it’s not hard to imagine the surprise it might have caused the younger Prince Philip, a trenchantly rough-tongued sailor, if he had heard his grandson was going to marry a black woman.

Matt Smith and Claire Foy in the new season of The Crown. Picture: Netflix

Of course it makes everyone want to cheer and so does the fact Markle appears to have been more than a nominal feminist since she was a girl (lobbying Hillary Clinton to get sexist ads cleaned up). She sounds feisty, and that heightens the romance of the story of that rough ranga, Harry, going down on one knee to propose and before he could get the words fully out she said, “Can I say yes?”, then he said, “Well, can I give you the ring?” And the ring, wouldn’t you know, in yellow gold, includes smaller diamonds on either side that had been the property of — guess who? The candle in the wind herself, Harry’s mother, Diana.

It was English novelist Julian Barnes who said bugger candles, she’d lived her life like a great bloody chandelier. Yet he, too, stood by the roadside to watch the cortege go past, as Britain did, as the world did.

Is the romance of the royal family that they are such ordinary people yet they are descended from figures who were tied one way or another with Elizabeth I and Richard the Lionheart and beyond them to the Saxon kings, to Edward the Confessor and Alfred the Great? Is that one reason a liberal jurist such as Michael Kirby remains a constitutional monarchist? Because the lottery of lineage means that a boyish jock such as Harry who falls for a glamourpuss such as Markle becomes part of the mythology of the days of our lives. Is there a deep wisdom somehow in the fact the divine right of kings has mutated into a kind of women’s magazine romance of everyday life writ glamorous because it’s regal?

Maybe we could do worse. It was constitutional monarchies such as Britain and Denmark that stood up to Adolf Hitler. Doesn’t something thrill in us when we remember the Queen Mother saying “Now we can look the East End in the face”, after Buckingham Palace was bombed during the war.

Is it because we’re monarchists under the skin? Not necessarily. Everyone from Bob Hawke down has talked with reverence about the Queen. Apart from anything else, the woman Claire Foy plays in The Crown with such drop-dead delicacy and conviction has had a life of nothing but public service. And The Crown captures this superbly while also indicating that the murmurs of the heart can loom larger in the myths we make of everyday life writ grand and royal than apparently mightier matters of state.

Peter Morgan’s script for The Crown, together with the dazzling direction and producing of Stephen Daldry, the wizard of Billy Elliott, ensures the two dovetail. In the latter stages of season one we saw Jeremy Northam as Anthony Eden speak in Arabic to Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Season two will run from the Suez Crisis, which brought Eden down and saw the rise of Harold Macmillan — the man who said “Events, dear boy, events” were the major obstacle to any politician, and played here by that subtle and superb actor, Anton Lesser — to the time of the Profumo affair, which brought down Supermac himself.

There are worse ways of gleaning the details of the trailing cloaks of history than to see it through the coloured glass of the domestic and dynastic drama of the royal family’s private lives which — like all the press coverage of the past 70-odd years, but more so — present with such compelling glamour and titillation.

Season two presents Prince Philip, played convincingly and a bit rakishly by Matt Smith, as a bit of a philanderer and there has always been gossip about this.

I remember in the 1970s the poignancy of the story I read of the Queen going to a cinema dressed down, in a scarf, with some gay old keeper of paintings on a Sunday night. People would look at her twice, then conclude she was an ordinary woman who looked a bit like the Queen. The Crown captures the ordinary royal woman subjected to the throne and the loneliness of the long-distance monarch.

Season two also shows us the Queen and Philip in the vicinity of those elected monarchs, the Camelot couple, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, and shows us Anthony Armstrong-Jones, the man who married Margaret, portrayed by Matthew Goode.

It’s funny, my childhood memory yields a more vivid recollection of Princess Margaret’s marriage to Snowdon (as he became, the photographer earl) than it does of the Cuban missile crisis, which was Jack Kennedy’s brief shining moment, though I do remember the chill down my spine when my father said, “You know, the world almost blew up last week.”

The Crown is superb at telling us the stories that we remember like the sort of gossip that turns into legend.

Morgan came to fame with Stephen Frears’s The Queen (2006),in which Helen Mirren played the role with a delicacy and a majesty that might have repaid the great roles for older women in Shakespeare’s plays.

We’re told that seasons three and four of The Crown will have Olivia Colman (of Rev and Broadchurch fame) as the Queen, and one can only imagine that Daldry has Mirren up his sleeve for the concluding two series scheduled.

The Crown is a monument to our commonplace, commonwealth sense of how the monarchy takes ordinary life — heartbreaks of infidelity, marriages prevented, marriages ruined — and presents it with the pomp and circumstance of myth and ritual.

And that, too, is part of the frisson of Harry and Markle in all its mundane soap opera, fairytale romance ordinariness, which may conceivably lead to some future transfiguration. The monarchy mutates and the crown thrives on the drama of this. And it’s there anyway — as Harry and Markle’s engagement shows — in the fact we can’t look away from this mob.

Think of Margaret, the one who had her heart broken. Who could forget the Christopher Hitchens story of seeing her sit down at a piano and belt out My Old Man’s a Dustman?

I’ve certainly never forgotten the story told by a friend about how she was taken to Kensington by poet John Betjeman and his mistress Lady Elizabeth Cavendish in the days of the Snowdon marriage. Of how she watched, dumbstruck, as the woman who had lost her heart to the famous group captain drank a whole bottle of gin. And how, at one point, she said of her sister, the Queen: “If I put my fingers into that woman’s purse, I would have them cut off.”

The Crown is a superb series because it feeds on these legends and turns them into an irresistible soap, an expression of familiar stories that delight the mind.

The Crown is available for streaming on Netflix from December 8. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle intend to marry in May next year.