Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish - reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week, I rambled about a few things since I was busy working on NaNoWriMo (I finished this week!). Tina reviewed another Ruth Ware novel, The Turn of the Key.
The fourth season of The Crown on Netflix corresponds to a time period when I was paying attention to events on the world stage. So, this is the first season that I experienced as more memory than history. Although there was a lot that I didn't remember and, of course, many behind-the-scenes incidents that are varying degrees of fictional.
The first episode includes the assassination of Lord Mountbatten by the IRA, an event and its aftermath that I would have read about in Time and Newsweek during my job as first-hour library assistant at my high school. One of my duties, being the first assistant of the day, was to display the magazines that arrived in the previous day's mail. I took that opportunity to be the first to read some of them.
That was the same semester that I wrote a term paper on Prince Charles. I remember thinking that he was way too old for me, but that I shared some of his interests like history and gardening. As it turned out, a few months later, we were all hearing about Diana Spencer who was only a year older than me and probably not enough interested in the things that Charles liked.
I was mildly disturbed from the beginning of this series (see my first post on The Crown) about fictionalizing personal events between living people who have memories of real conversations and motivations behind events that the public experience only from the outside. Paradoxically, in some of the later seasons, I wasn't entirely comfortable with how people are portrayed who are no longer with us to defend themselves (I'm thinking particularly of Princess Margaret in Seasons 2 and 3 and Princess Diana in Season 4).
None of those qualms, however, kept me from watching this show with complete fervor!
This season seemed to generate more commentary and speculation than previous seasons. Even before I finished watching, YouTube was trying to get me to watch videos like Top 10 Facts The Crown Season 4 Got Right & Wrong:
Have you watched Season 4 of The Crown? What did you think?
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
