![]() In his wild youth-as opposed to his regal maturity-Harry was probably unaware that Elizabeth I had ordered the cultivation of cannabis in England back during her reign. Instead of the flashbacks of season 1, there will be flash-forwards to Prince Harry having a rebellious go at some weed. Just before his execution in the Tower of London, Raleigh will pronounce a surgeon general style curse on the royal house that will come into full deadly force only four centuries later. ![]() That’s when we’ll meet tobacco man Sir Walter Raleigh and see Elizabeth I smoke a pipe of the Virginian leaf. Once that territory has been conquered, the series will turn its hungry gaze backward, at some point sighting the first Elizabeth in its viewfinder. The Crown will inexorably colonize the time from the 1950s of the first season right up to the tabloid now of William and Kate and the lesser rest. Elizabeth forced her husband Philip to give up the “disgusting” practice, otherwise it would likely have claimed him too. The main message of the show-weirdly comforting for a viewer with a hacking cough-is that tobacco was a mighty sword of anti-colonialism: it killed Elizabeth’s father and sister (Margaret is the most glamorous on-screen smoker among the Windsors and their courtiers), and it took its toll on her first prime minister, the stroke-addled, booze-befogged Churchill. Only Elizabeth II doesn’t indulge the habit. Physical discomfort is blunted by the sumptuous distractions that drift across the screen: the grand staircase of an ersatz Buckingham Palace the Scottish Highlands late colonial subjects arrayed on the tarmac of a Kenyan landing strip to be mustered by a young, vigorously obtuse Prince Philip the nude wood and beige leather of the royal plane’s cabin Wallis Simpson’s décolletage a vintage bi-plane gliding down onto Essex fields Churchill’s cane and whisky glass the oaken interior of the Archbishop’s Palace and the episcopal purple cassocks that glide through it a charging bull elephant dogs horses and everywhere the twisting clouds of cigarette smoke. With just a wave of the remote control, and without a prescription, the patient is transported into a numbed, sometimes happy stupor. In nine individually packaged hour-long doses the first season provides many of the benefits of much stronger medications without most of the side effects. (Netflix).īattling the flu over Christmas and into the New Year, I abjured all narcotics save one-the Netflix original series The Crown. Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret in The Crown.
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