The Crown: The Official Podcast

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Series intro

Welcome to the Crown, the official podcast. I'm Edith Bowman, and this show will follow the fourth season of the Netflix original series, The Crown episode by episode, taking you behind the scenes, speaking with many of the talented people involved and diving deep into the stories. 

Episode intro

Today, we're talking about episode two, titled the Balmoral Test. Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Dennis are invited to holiday at the Royal residency in rural Scotland. Lady Diana Spencer is also invited to join for a weekend, but who will pass the infamous Balmoral Test? 

Now we will cover specific events and scenes that feature in this episode. So if you haven't watched episode two yet, well, I suggest you do it now or very soon.

Edith v/o

Coming up later, we'll hear from head of research, Annie Sulzberger, on how the team approached the Charles and Diana story.

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We had to go into this series with a level of scepticism. About not just the material, but who was writing the material, how it was commissioned that we have not had to do with previous series.

Edith v/o

We'll also hear from head set decorator, Alison Harvey

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Edith v/o

But first I was lucky enough to sit down with Paul Whittington, who directed The Balmoral Test. Now on this podcast, we've heard time and time again from everyone involved that collaboration between all the departments is key to bringing this story to life. So I asked Paul what it was like to join the crown family for series four.

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P: It's a fantastic canvas to work on. And you're given a you are given a freedom as well. I mean, Peter has this kind of brilliant. Ability. I don't quite know how he does it, but to be all over it. And at the same time to give you freedom to go out and direct and do your work and encourages that and trust you to do that.

And it is also a show in which you do get to execute your story exactly how you want to. 

E: Yeah. 

P: And that doesn't always mean that doesn't always mean, you know, spending money on huge set pieces or pieces of kit or numbers of extras or, or whatever it is. The collaboration is all about what is the story we're trying to tell.

What's the human story that we're trying to tell here and whatever we feel the best way to tell it is. That's, that's what we'll be able to do. 

E: Let's talk about Balmoral test, episode two, and your, your two women who are off to Balmoral to be tested and, you know, one of the big things of this is obviously the introduction to Diana and that cloud that covers this entire season. You know, we know the outcome of this, this situation, this woman's life and stuff. And so that's. You know, I, from talking to Peter that that's weighed so heavily on how he portrays her, but also making sure there's, there's a truth there as well. And, but for you in terms of, of approaching her as a character. And I imagine trying to remove your own personal experience, you know, as a, as a, as a human being and, and, and witnessing her as a real person, is that easy thing to do as a director? 

C: Do you have a busy summer? 

D: I'll be in London for most of it, embarrassingly available, if that's what you're asking.

C: I'll be in Zimbabwe for a couple of weeks. And then Scotland but perhaps we could meet again in the Autumn? Oh dear you’d rather not.

D: Oh it’s just such a long way away 

C: No it will fly by 

D: No it won’t, it will drag horribly. But all good things come to those who wait. 

P: Absolutely. And I think what we learned was, and what we, decisions we took was that actually Diana, she was from that world, you know, what's interesting about Thatcher   when she goes there, that's not Thathcer’s world, but this is Diana’s world, you know, she's from that kind of stock, if you like. So she knew even though later on she was very much a kind of metropolitan figure if you like. And that's, that's where she, I guess, felt most at home, but she, she knew the country life and she kind of knew what was expected of her. I think.

And I couldn't believe when I was reading the script that I think I would ever say this, but I like, I'm really liking the Thathcers. I really like them. (LAUGHS) They're really good fun. They're really entertaining. And actually I'm with them. I'm with the Thatchers here because I can empathize with them. We've all been to a party where we feel like we don't really fit, fit in and we're kind of worried about it.

E: Wearing the wrong dress.

And so that was always there in the script. And then really, it was just a gift to then sort of play with it and think about, okay, so. Every time we see the Thatchers, they've got to be at odds with the environment, that's of course the way Gillain and Stephen Boxer who plays Dennis play it.

There's a physicality about that, but it's in everything about what Amy Roberts did with the costumes, the colors are wrong, you know, the colors are all wrong. The fabrics are all wrong. She is just at odds with this environment the whole time. 

T: No, no, no. I like to do that myself, especially for my husband…

…Ma'am you didn't bring any outdoor shoes. T: That's right? 

P: It’s a remarkable transformation, isn't it, you know, in every way, physically tonally voice, everything. It's, it's an incredible transformation. And I remember actually the first time it really struck me and I think struck us as a, as a production was, before we even started shooting when we were doing camera tests. She'd obviously been doing a lot of work prior to that in terms of movement, posture, she'd be doing the voice, but a lot of physical movement training, if you like to get into, into character and we'd lined up a long shot, sort of on, on one of the sets at Elstree and we turned over and said, okay, Gillian, can you just step into shot now?

And I'm not exaggerating she stepped in. And there was a kind of palpable intake of breath of everybody around the monitor. Going God. And she was almost in silhouette at that point. 

Edith: Yeah. 

Peter: So you had you know, the, the hair and makeup and the costume were all exquisite, you know, you had the hair, but there was something just about about the way she stood, the way she held her hands, the way the handbag hung on her arm. It was really striking and it just felt like, it sounds a bit corny, but it felt like Thatchers in the room, it really did. And then we said, okay, great. Can you now just walk towards the camera and stand up on this mark and Thatcher had this very, very unique way of walking. She was like, she was always, it was always like she was in a hurry to get somewhere.

And then Gillian just sets off on this, and barrels along towards camera 

E: You're walking backwards. 

P: Yeah exactly! And it's almost like you kind of involuntarily, we kind of started laughing. Not because it was comedic, but you know when you see something that's so exciting, you almost have this reflex to laugh and it was quite brilliant. I mean, so as a physical transformation, it was incredible in every way because she's worked out every aspect of it, how she holds the bag, how she would pick up a pen, how she might put her jewellery on it's all meticulously worked out so, but what's brilliant about it is that it is incredibly technical in that way, but she gets the technicality to a point where she can then free herself of it and then she's free to play and then she's free to, because that's all there, that's somehow, already instinctively in there, and then she has the freedom to, to explore and, and so emotionally go where she needs to go. 

Q: What size are you?...

T: …I'll be as quick as I can.

P: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And it was important for us for that stag to become a character in the piece. And we, we would revisit it at certain points throughout the episodes. What it means metaphorically is for, is for everybody to make their own judgment on I think.

E: I like that. It's not mine anymore. It's yours to interpret the way you want to interpret it, but it's lovely as well, you know, in terms of the way that, nothing ever feels rushed as well. And I think with this episode in particular, the way that the landscape is allowed to breathe and, and to kind of almost show off in a way kind of reinstates that idea that they feel so at home here and this is their natural habitat almost, so to speak.

Edith v/o

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E: Alison, thank you so much for joining me today. Do you mind sort of explaining what the role of a set decorator designer is? 

So we, well, I and the team start off by talking to Martin, the designer.

E: Yeah 

A: Right at the beginning of the season and having a chat through the feel. He'll, he'll have some kind of key references, some maybe some film stills or something that he maybe discussed with the directors. And then we as a department kind of inhabit the spaces that are chosen. So we, we sort of flesh out what, what kind of is the page and then what is unspoken in the script.

So it's to try and bring the life and the soul to a space and create an environment where the actor feels they can do their best work. So we'll dress the drapery, the carpets, the things they pick up, the things in the drawers, the perfume they wear,

E: The cutlery they use?   

A: Yeah. Just everything, you know we do the animals we do guns. We do everything that isn't sort of solid and isn't an actor. 

E: Yeah. 

A: So it’s their world really. 

E: And that encompasses both sets that are built, um, at studios, but then also real locations as well, which I imagine that you have to go in, there's a lot of big grand houses that are used, but I imagine you have to design them and dress those.

A: Yes.

E: On top of what's already there almost. 

A: Yes cause we have to, we have to be era specific. 

E: Yeah. 

A: So, I mean, in the beginning we did a big sort of room of references from each year. 

And then you see how the color palettes change, how the tastes change. So know we've been the 50s through now to the early nineties. And so how kind of different colors are in vogue different patterns are in vogue, and then you get a sort of sense sort of at a glance, which you then try and inhabit yourself as to what feels right. What feels right. What feels eighties, what feels seventies and where those characters would sit within that decade.

A: Yes. I mean, it's an essence of, so it's, it's the right period furniture. It's the right flavor. So different palaces have different identities, so Sandringham will be more relaxed, Balmoral more baronial and more, because queen Victoria sort of furnished those later, but then you've got Windosr, which is a bit more Victorian. But Buckingham palace is a bit more French. 

E: You mentioned Balmoral and episode two, which very much focuses on Balmoral  as a big character in that episode. I don't think I've seen that much footage, so to speak of inside Balmoral, it feels like this it's a place that they very, they keep very private. Does that allow you kind of more creative control in terms of creating what you imagine it to be like inside. 

We sort of went back to queen Victoria when there are sort of stills and I, and again, I guess, extrapolated from that, that not that much would have been changed. It just falls apart around them slightly. I think. So. I mean, we did bring in a lot of tartan because we know that that's, there is a lot of tartan, for real, you know. So it looks a bit like if we didn't know that you would, you'd sort of possibly shy away from that, it was too obvious as a sort of statement, but no, all the carpets are tartan, so…

E: Amazing.

E: The stag is a big sort of emblem and it's got an iconic position within this episode as well. Can you talk a little bit about recreating that and how that was done? 

A: The whole kind of excitement around the breakfast table in the morning is it's a 14 point stag, which is the oldest most prized stag. So they're rare.

So, obviously we couldn't necessarily find, the stag had to be in several kinds of permutations. It had to be dead, caped in action, where they take the skin off to make, to mount the head, um, had to be presented as a trophy on the wall already stuffed. And then it also had to be liftable and movable by actors from a pony

So we had various configurations of this. We found an antique Stag's head that we then had to remove the antlers from, because that was the 14 point stag. So we had a pair of 14 point antlers, which we then had to basically screw on to fake or live dead deer. So we had to cut that with the footage they shot of the real stalking scene.

E: Yeah. 

A: Which then visual effects had to superimpose onto the live footage because the live footage didn't have a 14 point antler. So there's sort of this kind of melding 

E: Amazing. 

A: of, there must've been sort of two prosthetics, one kind of green cutout that looked like the shape of a stag that the visual effects could sort of pin their their effects to. One, that was part of the estate cull, that was a dead freshly killed stag, but that didn't have the right antlers. So then we had to watch screw these aren't that's basically to various stags in various states. So, I mean, it's just complicated 

E: And that's just one tiny thing… we take so much for granted when we watch a scene.

So you’ve found him… 

…Walking four hours before we found him! Four? Four!

E: Have you got an Easter egg you're most proud of? 

A: I suppose all the perfumes, I quite like the perfumes. The queen had a Dior perfume that was made for Grace Kelly, oh no it’s a Creed, sorry. It's a Creed made by Creed. So the queen has that, allegedly. So we buy one of her and that's what is nice about the packaging of that is very of her

Heyday as well. So it's fifties, the queen mum is something like Guerlain or something from the fourties and her bottle, encapsulates her and then Diana was very eighties again. Margaret Margaret had a-

E: Chanel? I think of her as chanel 

A: No, but again its a sixties bottle. 

E: Yeah. 

A: But yeah, so each kind of perfume design bottle sort of feels quite like the character. So you just in those four perfume bottles, you sort of see the decades of, of when those women were feeling their most fabulous.

E: Have you ever been able to get hold of the real things?  

A: I bought some real letters. 

E: Oh wow. 

A: So we can look at the calligraphy of how they laid that, you know, princess Diana, how she, her handwriting, some of Margaret Thatcher's and some of Harold Wilson's actual correspondence, just so we can get as much detail as we can, as correct as we can so that the actors feel as close to the real person as possible I suppose. 

E: What's been the trickiest thing to either source or make, would you say 

A: Princess Margaret body double with removable lungs. We had to make a fake princess Margaret body. 

E: Okay. 

A: When she's having a lung operation. 

E: Yeah. 

A: There had to be a kind of cavity where lungs could be removed.

So I mean, that's quite obscure. 

E: It's not, that's not something you're going to find on eBay as well. 

A: Not so much, not so much! 

E: That's going to be something you're going to have to make! 

Edith v/o

E: Balmoral was not only a huge part of this episode as a physical setting, but a social setting as well. I spoke once more to the Crown’s head of research, Annie Sulzberger, about the history of Balmoral and its relevance to the Royal family.

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A: So Balmoral was this sort of romanticized private estate that queen Victoria and Albert found. 

There's no expectation and same with Sandringham that they really have to do work there. It's, it's meant to be this. I mean, they go every August, September, that period of eight weeks, their family members are in and out.

They have cousins staying and Charles’s friends come up every summer and it's a, it's a re it's a genuine sort of family reunion every August. And so they can relax. I mean, she obviously still works, but I think she probably reduces her hours and spends more time outside with her family. And they do all of their proper aristocratic sporting of stalking and shooting and things like that.

So it's a, it's their playground. 

E: We get a real sense of, and tell me how much kind of you, you know, the research that went into this, the idea of the kind of parlor games that they play and, you know, the 

A: Ibble dibble? 

E: Ibble dibble, is just, 

A: Ibble dibble is great. 

M: Number three ibble dibble with two dibble ibbles…

…Did I get that right? Yes you did.

A: The parlour games are great because I mean, personally, I love that kind of structured fun, but you can see that, that for Thatcher it’s just forced fun. I mean, there's nothing enjoyable about this. And again, it was, I suppose, a part of this, these sort of tests, you know, Harold Wilson would muck in and really enjoy these parlor games and,

They, they did a whole variety of them. Charades was their favorite, but they also did ones where you'd like mime words and phrases. They were called food for thought. And top of the tree.

So the game was sort of continue to the next day sometimes because for the word games, they'd get the guest preachers who are preaching at the local parish church the next day. 

E: Oh wow. 

A: To weave in the words from the game into the sermon. And then the younger Royals would be like (LAUGHS) in the background.  We had to think about what kind of games could work on screen. And David Hancock, who was a staff writer on our team at the time he told us about ibble dibble, which he used to play with his family. And it seemed to us like the kind of game that Thatcher would have found incredibly uncomfortable. We don't actually know if the Royal family play Ibble dibble but we do know that Thatcher had been forced to play these other parlor games like charades, even though she hated it.

E: It's almost like a testing ground for people as well. Isn't it? Hence the Balmoral test being the title of it. 

A: Yes, exactly. It's just, it's the sink or swim house. 

E: Essentially, you know, in terms of like the research that you've done on this, is that what kind of, how people have referred to it. 

A: Yeah.

And it's as early as series one, when we were researching the courtship of Phillip and Elizabeth, you know, they claim that the final vetting place was Balmoral for Philip, and it was whether or not he was going to get along there. We started learning about this early, but it was in the Charles the bachelor years research that we learned more and more about the expectation of, he would bring a woman up. 

E: Hmm. 

A: And they would think, Ooh, a grand castle, the Highlands, there’ll be fun, beautiful balls. And they do dress and there's the Gillies ball and all these things, but they would go up thinking this was going to be kind of a social event. And then find themselves in waders, in the middle of the loch, you know, watching Charles fish and a lot of women would go away being like, God bless not for me.

So when Diana comes and she really mucks in, which she did, they are like, thank God, finally. After so many sort of attempts with other people, we really feel this, this girl was a part of us. Now, mind you she's always sort of been, she was born and raised in a house on Sandringham estate, her father was an equerry, her maternal grandmother is the queen mother's lady in waitingm she's lady, Diana Spencer.

At this time. She is not your average Joe. So she sort of knows that it's expected of her to get down and dirty a little bit. And she does it. Now what's sort of great about this is she does it knowing, I think that this was a bit of a test. 

E: Does she? 

A: She hates it. She hates it, but she pulls it off.

And, and what you will find once they're married is, she is a city girl. This is not her jam at all. And she has managed, you know, Thatcher was incapable of pretending. 

E: Yeah. 

A: But Diana is very very good at that.

E: The whole subject of Charles and Di has this worldwide fairytale emotional connection with the world in terms of how it started, what it was. And we all know the, the terrible tragedy of how it ended, but when you are going into portraying these characters in a dramatized series, I can't imagine how difficult it was to, to know how to portray them and not portray them, to know what to say and what not to say. And I just wanted to ask about the research that went into that, how close you got to them or their closest confidence or whatever, and how you kind of navigate that. 

A: This is a, it's a difficult subject in two different difficult characters, partly because so much has been written about them on their behalf and by them.

E: And everyone has an opinion. 

A: Yeah, exactly. So, um, we had to go into this series with a level of scepticism about not just the material, but who was writing the material, how it was commissioned that we have not had to do with previous series. Our research team got younger with this series, partly because we wanted people who didn't grow up really with Diana being a figure in their lives. And so they came into it not having an opinion either way, which I think was actually a very important to try to reduce the inherent prejudices that we, we in the nineties and eighties who grew up with her have. 

Diana authorized a book that she provided recordings for. It is essentially her autobiography. That was the Andrew Morton book, ‘Her True Story’ in 1992. So when she died, he was allowed to say, yes, she authorized it. And yes, these were her words, essentially. So in some ways, it's very useful, you have interviews with her and she's taking you through her first time at Balmoral but she's also, she's writing it in hindsight.

Philip: So I suppose I must've seen you grow up on the estate of Sandringham when you lived in the cottage there… 

The Navy, and I’m the one asking the question. 

E: How would you describe her? You're younger than me, but was she in your kind of, part of you growing up. 

A: Yeah she was, um, I was born in 82. I think she was by the time I was cognizant of things the people's princess. I feel so bad for her, honestly, and I feel so bad for Charles because they are unbelievably similar people.

They felt unloved in childhood. They felt abandoned and misunderstood. What they really needed, and what I think you see with Charles's success with Camilla is they didn't need to marry themselves. They needed to marry people who could offer the support and the love that they, in all honesty, were sort of incapable of offering because they were so inward looking.

And asks for a trial separation. And in the end she loses custody of her children. There are many stories of Diana, watching her mother drive away. She's too young to understand this is permanent. And she sits at the same step every day for weeks, just waiting for mother to come back. Her father I don't think was a bad man, but I think he was an aristocratic father with four children. You know, they were raised by a string of nannies and, it gets to the point where she finds out from the press that her father has remarried.  And funnily enough, he's remarried the daughter of the only author she really loves, which is Barbara Cartland. So as her mother's left and she has left in this realm with her sisters, fantasy becomes a really big part of her life. She wants to be liked. She wants to be loved and she will manipulate in order for that to happen.

And one of the paths she takes is this obsession with Barbara Cartland Romance novels. So by the time she meets Charles, the only real understanding she has of the opposite sex is fantasy romance. She has no understanding of what it actually means to be a companion, to someone, a partner, to help guide them through their emotional issues and frustrations of the day. And I think this is a girl who was emotionally quite stunted at the moment that her mother left and essential to understanding why she says yes to Charles is that he can not divorce her. He can't, it is unheard of that the heir to the throne will divorce a wife. So Diana feels that this provides her inescapable safety and comfort.

A: The problem, they, that the Royal family made in approving Diana so much as, as a partner for Charles is, she was 19 and she was born into aristocracy and lived in the Royal estate. And she knew, they thought she knew what would have been asked of her.

A: They believed she would be docile. They believed she would be managed and Charles could shape her into whatever he wanted, and -

E: But he didn't even want to. 

A: Well that's, exactly. I mean, there are many problems with this, but the expectation was she knows us. It's like keeping it in the family. She knows us. She knows our ways.

Charles: Then I was summoned for a conversation with Papa in the hanging room were oblivious to the grotesque symbolism it might as well have been me strung up and skinned…

…she's a child.

CLIP: What can you tell us about the actual wedding?...

…Whatever in love means.

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