I have never really watched The Crown. Not that I don’t believe it will be a great production, but stories about a remote Royal Family of a country that rendered me almost stateless by revoking my full British Citizenship prior to the handover of Hong Kong back to China was not a very appealing formular for me. Further, I was not very familiar with the events of the Royal Family to understand the ‘truthfulness’ of the series.
Then came Season 4. With its buzz about Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher entering the fray, things became a lot more interesting. Interesting because that’s when I start to have memories of the Royal Family and the British politics.
Since the debut of the new season, there were lots of critics and news about whether the latest season has over-dramatised the events or whether they are just painting a bad picture of the Royal Family for viewership.
It’s a series about the Royal Family, so you would expect all the glamour and grandiose with sets, fashion, accessories, cars etc. etc. They were interesting and they were good. However, what drew my attention of the season was not those things, and neither was the episode that was in ‘Australia’. It was the episode about the intruder at the Buckingham Palace who had a short audience with the Queen.
I never knew about this, or maybe I have heard but forgot but the episode’s story was extremely interesting. We moved from the above the ground lives of the Royal Family to the gritty and grim suburbs of London. The part of the society that was stuck on the ground (or even in the mud) when Margaret Thatcher was burning through her agenda of healing the country’s economy, while spending billions of dollars on a war off the coast of South America. The war was won, the Queen was safe, but was the country healed? I think that was what really bothered me with that episode.
There were arguments on all sides. For Thatcher, it was what was necessary to be done. She believes in hard work, she believes in resilience, she believes in hardlines because she ultimately believes that the state has created a bunch of lazy citizens that was crippling the progress of the country. The Queen believes in the elected government would do what’s the best for the country, and whatever tactics the government uses, it will turn things around and her subjects will be better off. For Michael Fagan, he is failing and flailing because he has used up all his means to survive, from finding a job to trying his best to turn things around so he can be with his kids again. I don’t know how much of his experience was true and how much was fictional, but what I observed was that a lot of things that we thought we can take for granted, something like, ‘hard work leading to prosperity and at least a job to put a roof over our head and food on our table’ doesn’t always work. The issue is how much collateral damage are we happy to have to achieve our goals.
The downfall of Margaret Thatcher was her eventual lack of community sense for her people, and hence the poll tax – for me that’s a tax to just prove your existence in this world, and not even mention your right to exist. In one of the final scenes, the conversation between the Queen and Thatcher was intriguing – Thatcher (played brilliantly by Gillian Anderson), when being questioned by the Queen (also played brilliantly by Olivia Colman), insisted that her hard hitting approach is the dose of medicine required to turn the country around. And the Queen replied comparing her approach as a deadly chemotherapy that could kill off the patient before saving it.
I am not a supporter of people relying on the social benefits to get by without trying as I believe in everyone must work hard to make this society work. However, at the same time, I do not believe in leaving people behind in the dust, simply because you can think of them as collateral damages for a ‘greater good’. Even living in this democracy of Australia, I believe in the delicate balance of policy and hence a lot of times both sides of politics infuriated me.
I never thought that watching a show on Netflix could be so thought provoking, especially it is just about the Royal Family, whom I can’t even remotely associate myself with. However, intentional or not this episode about Michael Fagan really got me thinking – how could individuals withstand the roaring social political tides that probably have never thought of them as collateral damages? As mankind moved forward in history, did we become complacent about what is happening among us, because most of us are either too busily surviving within our means or stepping over other people’s corpses to achieve our goals?
These are questions I probably will never have any answers to.
