Princess Diana's Brother Says He's Concerned People Treat The Crown 'Like a History Lesson'
The fourth season of The Crown, now available to stream on Netflix, might as well just be called "the Diana season." Finally, we are at the part of the royal family's
history that involves Diana Spencer's marriage to Prince Charles, which means we're in for a healthy dose of incredible, indelible fashion, and a ton of drama.
This season of the Netflix show is its most compelling yet, in my opinion, but it is important to keep one thing in mind when you are binging it: It is a show.
Per Us Weekly, on the November 22 episode of Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh, Princess Diana's brother Earl Charles Spencer tells the host that he wasn't exactly pleased with viewers' tendencies to think that everything in The Crown is presented exactly as it happened in real life.
"The worry for me is that people see a program like that and they forget that it is fiction," he reportedly said. "They assume—especially foreigners, I find Americans tell me they have watched The Crown as if they have taken a history lesson. Well, they haven't." He went on: "It is very hard, there is a lot of conjecture and a lot of invention, isn’t there? You can hang it on fact but the bits in between are not fact."
Spencer also shared that The Crown producers approached him to ask if they could film the family's estate, Althorp, where Diana and Charles initially met.
"Actually, The Crown asked if they could film at Althorp, and I said 'Obviously not,'"
In the past, Spencer has been open about some of the tension he had with the royal family following his sister's death in 1997. In 2017, upon the 20th anniversary of the tragedy, he said that he thought it was a "bizarre and cruel thing" to make Prince Charles and Prince Harry walk behind their mother's casket during the televised funeral procession.
"I was lied to and told that [William and Harry] wanted to do it, which of course they didn't," he told the BBC's Radio 4 program. "It was the worst part of the day by a considerable margin, walking behind my sister's body with two boys who were obviously massively grieving their mother. It was a sort of bizarre circumstance where we were told you just have to look straight ahead. But the feeling, the sort of absolute crashing tidal wave of grief coming at you as you went down this sort of tunnel of deep emotion, it was really harrowing, actually, and I still have nightmares about it now."