The Crown review: Season six is awful garbage and scenes with Diana seem like guesswork

Elizabeth Debicki stars as Princess Diana in The Crown. Picture: Netflix

According to the sixth and final season of The Crown (Netflix), Diana’s ghost persuaded the Queen to leave Scotland for London and grieve for the former Princess. It wasn’t Tony Blair at all. He must be gutted.

I was gutted because season six is awful garbage. There were times when it felt like I was tied to the chair and forced to watch a made-for-TV movie about Princess Di, rushed out after her death in Paris in 1997. Stop watching, you might say – but this is The Crown, the best fusion of fact with fiction that we have ever seen on TV. Not any more.

The first four episodes cover the final eight weeks of Diana’s life. There are two locations, England and the south of France. The director has two settings for lighting. One is musty and brown, for England; the other is vivid and sparkling, for the south of France.

Charles is in musty, brown England trying to get his subjects to take to his new partner, Camilla. Diana has nothing to do for the summer, so Mohammed Al-Fayed asks her to join him at his ‘look at me’ villa near St Tropez. She arrives with her two boys, William and Harry. Mohammed also invites his son, Dodi, with the notion of making a social-climbing match with Diana. Dodi marries Di and Mohammed inherits step-grandchildren in line for the throne — that’s the plan as hammered home in a series of endless calls between Mohammed and Dodi.

This season of The Crown feels like it was made for people who are only half-watching because they are playing Wordle on their phone.

Diana with her sons in The Crown. Picture: Daniel Escale/Netflix/LeftBank

It’s endless scenes of Diana and Dido flirting with each other and engaging in a bit of light petting. It makes those Channel 5 royal-family dramas feel like the work of Martin Scorsese.

The beauty of earlier seasons of The Crown was the way they used contemporary Britain as a frame.

So we watched the royals navigate the end of empire, the rise of TV, the changes in sexual morality and more. It was gossipy and thrashy, but it allowed you pretend that you were interested in history.

The lives of the royals worked as a backdrop to the main story. Here, Diana is the main story. And she was, in fairness. I can remember the iconic shots of her on the yacht with Dodi Fayed back in 1997, how the British establishment recoiled at the notion of her getting married. The story then went stratospheric when they both died.

The problem is that most of the scenes here seem like guesswork. The only bit that worked was her relationship with her two sons – that was brilliantly done, it was heartbreaking. But the rest of it was clunky and the ‘ghost-appears-to-Queen’ scenes are just plain daft.

It’s just as well this is the last season of The Crown.