The Crown: The Official Podcast

Edith Bowman: Welcome to ‘The Crown: The Official Podcast.’

I'm Edith Bowman, and this is the podcast that follows the fifth season of the Netflix 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. 

Edith Bowman: It's time to focus on episode eight, ‘Gunpowder’.

We pick up with Princess Diana where we left off in episode seven, as journalist Martin Bashir goes to great lengths to dismiss Diana's concerns and film the risky Panorama interview in secret. But will there be consequences for Diana, the family and the BBC itself?

Victoria Stable: There’s only five seconds of him speaking, but we did find it. 

Edith Bowman: Wow

Victoria Stable: Yes, so that's always useful, you know. 

Edith Bowman: That’s amazing. 

Victoria Stable: He does speak! 

Edith Bowman: But first, let's hear from director of this episode, Erik Richter Strand.

Edith Bowman: Episode eight, ‘Gunpowder’. How would you describe this episode? 

Erik Richter Strand: Well, seven and eight is a two parter, really. It's like one long feature film divided. 

Edith Bowman: It’s like a feature film, yeah. 

Erik Richter Strand: Into two. Yeah. And this is the culmination of the story where seven ends, where you realise, okay, she's going to do this interview, and then eight is. How did the interview come about? What, How did they actually record it, and what was all the secret skullduggery that happened around it to culminate in this massive, nationwide event?

Edith Bowman: I love in this episode as well that we get to kind of refocus a bit on the Queen's perspective. Seven's very much Diana and following her journey to this point, and with ‘Gunpowder’, it feels like we get more of a, the kind of Queen's perspective and where she is leading up to that moment as well.

Tell us a little bit about the Queen's journey in this episode. 

Erik Richter Strand: Well, we start by seeing the Queen struggling with some old equipment, like an old television that she can't really make to work - she wants to see BBC.

Edith Bowman: She wants to watch the racing. 

Erik Richter Strand: She does well, she wants to watch the racing, but I think in the first scene she really wants to watch, you know, the news or BBC and trying to get that in there.

And William is the one who's trying to help her do that because he's, you know, now living in Eton, just down the road and he can come up on Sundays and have tea and, and help out Granny when she needs to. So, this lovely, quite domestic intimate moment really between the two of them that I really, that I really like.

And then of course that is bookended by the very last scene of the episode in which we realise the Queen is opening up for the future and the cornucopia of satellite television and the modernity that you can't help. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Erik Richter Strand: You can't keep it out. And still feeling that, you know, maybe it's not a good thing. Maybe all this new stuff isn't necessarily a good thing, you know it’s that sense…

Edith Bowman: Do you need it? 

Erik Richter Strand: Yeah. And here we are.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. It's lovely cuz it's a bit of light relief at times that watching the two of them, because you know, you forget at moments that it's the Queen and you know, the future King and that it, it's a granny and her grandson.

And the same way that any granny would get her grandson to come in and, and fix the latest piece of technology that she doesn't know how to deal with. 

Erik Richter Strand: Yeah, 

Edith Bowman: There's that lovely line as well where she sort of said, ‘Oh, well, with you being a young person, you know, I thought’, and he was like, ‘Wow. If it had been made in my lifetime, I might have been able to help you with it.’

Erik Richter Strand: Yeah. 

Edith Bowman: I think that's a great thing as well with the writing on the show is that there's, when it's needed, it sends the kind of tone of the, each episode so brilliantly that you know, when it's getting so heavy and deep that we just need that as an audience. Need a light lift. 

Erik Richter Strand: Yeah. 

Edith Bowman: Just to almost, because this is a heavy episode.

Erik Richter Strand: It is. 

Edith Bowman: This is, because we all, most of us, remember it or remember so much around it and it kind of being the start of something as well. 

Erik Richter Strand: Yeah, it's true. I like the way, in general how ‘The Crown’ incorporates television, because obviously television is a big part of many episodes and this season and in previous seasons, because it's the most public family and everything they do is followed and covered and documented and viewed by millions of people.

And they are sort of seeing themselves from the outside as how other people see them and that they all, they constantly have to react to what television is showing about them. And of course, that's very much the case in this story. 

Edith Bowman: And it's interesting though because then you've got this, you know, this lovely relationship that we watch of William and his granny. We kind of really see flourish and the importance of that relationship and the, the reliance on each other in a way as well, which is kind of nice to know that he has someone like that, I think, as well. 

Erik Richter Strand: It is, I feel like in these two episodes you get a sense that Elizabeth, the Queen, takes a keen interest in the future of the crown who basically has now moved to Eton and, which is very close to where she lives in Windsor, and she can sort of take him under her wing and, and just make sure that he's alright.

And she learns through those meetings that maybe he's not a hundred percent alright. And he's burdened by what he's experiencing.

Edith Bowman: I only discovered recently as well that the young actor playing William is in fact Dominic West's son. 

Erik Richter Strand: He is, it's Senan West. 

Edith Bowman: That's weird and brilliant and awesome.

Erik Richter Strand: It's fantastic. I mean, we, we had another actor in the first few episodes, who played, Timothy, his name was, and he was very good, but he was just a little bit too young to be able to make that leap to follow because the season goes through several years and we ended up in ‘95 and he was cast from ‘91, so we needed a new actor and we looked through hundreds of candidates and of course you end up with the candidate who's actually the son of the actor who plays Prince Charles.

It's completely based on merit. It's completely based on his performance in the auditions that he had with me and the casting agents and, and also opposite Elizabeth. He had scenes with Elizabeth and Imelda where he came across as this very perfect mix of very young adolescent boy and mature, serious man. 

Edith Bowman: So, episode eight, ‘Gunpowder’. 

There is so much to break down in this episode. I guess a good place to start is the BBC. The BBC is known the world over.

Annie Sulzberger: Mmm hmm. 

Edith Bowman: But it's interesting, I think for people, you know, maybe not in the UK, to have an understanding of what the BBC is and how it's linked to the government and the Royal Family.

Annie Sulzberger: Yeah. So, the BBC is the largest national broadcaster in the world, and it's the oldest. So, it starts in the 20s and it gets its charter, it's Royal Charter in ‘27. It's, you know, obviously initially radio it's not television quite yet, and then it expands to TV and digital as the technologies change. 

The Royal Charter does not mean that the corporation is in any way beholden to the sovereign. It's kind of a seal of approval from the Privy Council and I suppose the Monarch, and it serves as a bit of a kind of constitution for the corporation. 

It declares that there's a public interest aspect to this company. It sets up its public purpose.  It guarantees independence from the government, which is not really how it works because, there is a government department that oversees the BBC and they appoint Governors, Governors appoint Director Generals, you know, so to say that there's no government influence is not exactly quite right. 

And there is a relationship that shifts in this time to kind of saying it's a national institution that should reflect the policy and needs of the government and the sovereign. For example, I mean during just ahead of World War II when Neville Chamberlain's Prime Minister, Lord Reith, who helps found the BBC, and he is the first Director General, and it's his values of ‘to inform, to educate, to entertain’ that leads the BBC even today. He believes if the people elected the government, then the government is essentially for the people and has the same values of the people, then the BBC should reflect the government and you're like...that's kind of censorship.

So, he, he wouldn't allow things to go on air that would stand in the way of government policy or question it until war broke out and the government declared, ‘Yes, okay, we are now at war.’

And then all of a sudden that shifted and it was about telling the truth and nothing but the truth at that point. And that's really where the BBC takes off in terms of, I think the global understanding of it being one of the most trusted news organisations in the world.

And we pay for it. No advertising. It's all a licence fee by citizens. The idea is they're beholden to us, and that's what starts to shift in the nineties with their new director, General John Birt, who's in our show, who believes very wholeheartedly the people he has to serve are the people paying a licence fee, the citizens.  

Edith Bowman: Mmm hmm.

Annie Sulzberger: Whereas Duke Hussey who's the chairman of the Governor's, 

Edith Bowman: He's old school.

Annie Sulzberger: He's old school, he still believes in the ‘Auntie Beeb’ understanding of ‘We're gonna sort of patronisingly tell you what you need to hear’, and he believes very much so that the institutions, a government and monarchy should work with this other national institution of the BBC.

Edith Bowman: This episode, picking up from episode seven tells the story of how Diana came to actually film the infamous Panorama interview, which aired on the BBC's main TV channel, BBC One, in November 1995. Across these two episodes, we see the lengths that Martin Bashir went to, to convince Diana to take part, and even get the BBC to sign off on it. 

Can you tell us from your research about Martin Bashir how and why Diana did the interview with him in particular? What was the attraction, do you think, of Panorama being the right place for her? 

Annie Sulzberger: So, initially it wasn’t. 

Edith Bowman: OK. 

Annie Sulzberger: She was very sceptical of the BBC because she knew that people like Duke Hussey were very pro monarchy, I mean ultra. His wife is the Queen’s best friend and lady in waiting, essentially Godmother to Charles and formally Godmother to William. So she doesn’t trust it, she thinks that anything she says on the BBC will sort of be censored, or, it’s not a warm place for her to talk about her life in any way whatsoever. She’s being courted at the time by Oprah and Barbara Walters, so, it takes her a little while to come around to the idea of the BBC, and there’s lots of little programs, you know, she’s being courted all the time by the BBC. They sort of pitch a version of what you end up seeing which is much more focused on her charity work and defining her role in the future, with a different broadcaster Nicholas Whitchell. That gets changed out. A very junior person - Martin Bashir - comes in and I think there are two reasons she goes with them. I think she does have the realisation that the BBC is the national broadcaster, it is patriotic to go with them. 

Edith Bowman: Mmm-hmm. 

Annie Sulzberger: But that only happens, that realisation I think that she allows herself to have, when Martin Bashir says to her ‘Panorama will hide this from the people up above’. You know, ‘Panorama’ is an incredibly well respected current affairs program, it has some of the best journalists, it’s the Director General’s pet projects in bringing in even better special correspondents who are more unique in their talents, so, Bashir is one of those people he brings in in 1992. 

What Diana's gonna love about Bashir is that he presents himself as an outsider. Behind that exterior is unbelievable ambition. So somehow, he pitches a ‘let's look into the security services and see if they really are spying on celebrities and Royals’ and soon realises there’s not enough evidence in it for ‘Panorama’ to ever take it to air. ‘Cause they would want concrete evidence, and that's where things get real shifty. 

Edith Bowman: Because Bashir works out that the best way to her is through her brother.

Annie Sulzberger: Absolutely, Charles Spencer. 

So my team did a huge amount of research into this, real forensic sort of study, and our conclusions on what happened were really bolstered by the findings in the Dyson report, which came out in 2021. This was an official investigation into Bashir’s actions when he worked on ‘Panorama’, which was commissioned by the BBC board.

Now, our own research for the show started way before this came out, and it relied entirely on the publicly available sources, uh, previous to this. So that's newspaper articles, books, documentaries, et cetera, all covering, sort of, whistle blowing that started in late 1995, early 1996, there was even a BBC inquiry in 1996. And it's really shocking how much information was out there already, on the BBC, on Bashir’s sort of manipulation, his wrongdoing in this. The BBC squashed it. I mean, I imagine it's because it was the most successful news programme of the year and no one really wanted to, to tarnish that success. And I wanna give a little credit if I can, to my team on this one because it really is like, you know, the combined efforts of great investigative journalism on their parts and, and just creative research.

So we have Anna Basista, Anna Carden, Sophie Badman, and Nada Atieh-Williscroft. 

Annie Sulzberger: So, here's what we know. 

Martin Bashir is pitching the show on security services, spying on celebrities and royals. He knows that Charles Spencer had an issue with possibly being bugged and also some personal material making it to the press. He had an injunction out on his former head of security, and so that's his starting point. He's like, ‘Great, I have a legitimate reason to take a meeting with this guy and say I'm exploring this issue for ‘Panorama,’ the great, highly revered current affairs programme at the time’.

Edith Bowman: Come in.

Annie Sulzberger: Come in. And what he does is he has a graphic designer who freelances for the BBC to mock up statements proving that that head of security, who Charles Spencer was suspicious of but didn't have any evidence against, did indeed take cash. 

And so, he uses - it's so shocking cuz he's already been accused of mocking up or falsifying statements for a previous ‘Panorama’ he had done.

Edith Bowman:  No!

Annie Sulzberger: On Terry Venables. He claims he only mocked them up to show on screen cuz they didn't have them, but all the information was valid. 

Edith Bowman: Okay. 

Annie Sulzberger: That wasn't true. But Matt Wiessler who is the graphic designer, he believes that's what he's doing here again, which is essentially mocking stuff up to go on screen. But it all based on…

Edith Bowman: Factual. 

Annie Sulzberger: Legitimate information. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah.

Annie Sulzberger: So, he creates these two statements, and he approaches Charles Spencer with them, and then he just says, ‘And I think they're doing this to your sister too’, and that's all it took. 

Charles Spencer call’s Bashir’s boss Steve Hewlett and says ‘Is this guy legit?’ and Steve Hewlett says ‘He’s one of my best, yes’. I don’t think Steve Hewlett had any idea about the falsified statements, that was purely Bashir. 

So now he's got Charles Spencer on the hook, Charles Spencer then calls Diana. They have a very difficult relationship at this time, and he's like, ‘Listen, I know that you're a little annoyed with me and we haven't been close, but I've had this guy come, he's from the most legitimate current affairs program. I want you to meet him’.

And it's a heck of a meeting because Bashir comes armed with everything he could possibly throw at her, and he already knows that she's in a bit of a…a nervous state about...you know, sort of, I don't wanna say paranoid cuz it isn't paranoid, but is she sort of in the Royal Family? Is she not? She's separated. She is technically, she's still doing royal duties, but they, she also knows that they kind of have no idea what to do with her. 

Edith Bowman: Mmm hmm. 

Annie Sulzberger: So, she starts being convinced from Bashir's allegations that all of these suspicions she had, that she may have aired to her private secretary, but really not many others, some close friends were true. 

And the allegations range from the totally believable, to the utterly absurd, and that's when Charles Spencer switches off. 

So, a couple of allegations are like, you know, ‘yes your phone is bugged, your friends are selling some information to the newspapers, you need to be cautious with them. To Edward, Prince Edward has AIDS, he's being secretly cared for, for AIDS’...like okay?! To the Queen, having a heart condition, she's gonna die soon. So that's amplifying the kind of, Charles is gonna be King and we don't know what to do with you element of her concerns. 

And then things like William has a listening device in his watch that Charles planted and your son is listening to you all the time. To finally, Charles is having an affair with the nanny. So, all of these things that really concerned Diana because the nanny was very close to her sons and she was obviously insecure about their relationship.

So he says all this stuff, but what he also does is he screws up something. Which is, he tells the same story about her former, kind of head of security, that he had told to Charles Spencer about another person. Like perfect details, exactly the same. 

So Charles Spencer knows after this meeting, this guy's a total con artist, get away from him. And he even apologised to her like, ‘I'm sorry, Dutch,’ that was his nickname, Duchess, to her. You know, ‘I'm sorry for wasting your time’.

Edith Bowman: Walk away. 

Annie Sulzberger: But Diana is already desperate to get her story out there, even though she has in the back of her mind, this guy could be messing with me a little bit, there's enough there to keep her on the hook. And she doesn't tell Charles Spencer, she's still going. 

Edith Bowman: Wow. 

Annie Sulzberger: And then he ups the ante every time she has a wobble. So, the Charles is having an affair with the nanny, becomes Charles and the nanny had an affair and she got pregnant and had an abortion, and here's the receipt from the abortion.

I mean, Diana believed it ‘cause she went and confronted the nanny about it, things like that. So, he always knew to up the ante and that the big one was he showed falsified statements that he potentially had made himself showing that her private secretary and Charles' private secretary were in cahoots being paid by the security services and the newspapers to provide information on her and to spy on her and track her.

Edith Bowman: He's playing on every insecurity.

Annie Sulzberger: Every insecurity, every fear, and all he's trying to do is to get her so isolated from the people she trusted and who were there to look out for her, that she wholesale moves her trust to him, and she does it. She doesn't tell a single person on her staff or her friends what she's doing.

And really what we figured out, I think, is that she knew divorce was imminent, possibly, I mean, some people say that she had no idea this would trigger divorce. I think that's very naive. I think she did know. And she knew that a gag clause would likely be placed on her in those divorce negotiations. So I think this was her last chance to get her story out, her version to the public before that divorce was triggered. 

And this really was her version of events. Bashir may have stoked her fears, but she had a lot of agency in what she said. This is her truth. You know it, it's on a news current affairs program, but it is much more of a confessional. And she blurs some lines. You know, she talks about Charles' infidelity with Camilla and how it impacted her, and she mentions James Hewitt, but she doesn't talk about the other five relationships that she had whilst married.

And she wades into sort constitutional issues, Charles's fitness to be King, which I think a lot of people found to be inappropriate.

Birt: I expected it to be dynamite.

Bashir: It’s sensational John, biggest coup of our careers..

Edith Bowman: How did it affect the BBC's relationship with the Royals?

Annie Sulzberger: The Palace will claim it did not affect them at all. But I think the fact that they moved the Christmas speech to ITV might be an indicator. John Birt would say, ‘No, that was actually in the works. They were considering giving it to another broadcaster at the time.’

So, I think it's a moment where, you know, there's still a huge royal connection, but it's a moment where I think the BBC declares like, We're no longer beholden to you. We're still respectful, but we're no longer reverent.

Edith Bowman: Annie you've filled us in some pretty unbelievable context around the Panorama interview, but in this episode we also see the Queen herself wrestle with television in her own way.

So, for our feature question this episode, we wanna know, did the Queen really get satellite TV installed to watch horse racing? 

Annie Sulzberger: Yes. It looks like she got satellite TV installed in the late nineties, and then pretty much all the royal residences had them by 2000. 

We know that the Queen Mother rented the satellite channel that you get in betting shops. It's called the ‘SIS channel’ because that's how much she bet on horse racing and she didn't bet well, I will just tell you that much. When she died, I think there was about £4 million in debt that the Queen had to cover, not just the bets but her lifestyle.

Edith Bowman: Much of this episode centres around the Royal Family's relationship with television, and we've already heard from Annie about the significance of broadcasters like the BBC in Britain. 

So I wanted to speak to someone whose role behind the scenes on ‘The Crown’ is pivotal in getting real footage of these historical moments into the show, enriching the context and the story: Archive Producer, Victoria Stable.

Victoria Stable: An archive producer is really an experienced film researcher, which is a bit more explanatory. I'm responsible for finding anything that has any copyright invested in it that doesn't belong to ‘The Crown’. So, anything we haven't generated ourselves, be it sound, or moving footage. I only do the moving footage. I don't get bogged down with stills. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Victoria Stable: Each department, I think, does their own stills research, and the research department, of course, do these wonderful visual documents using photographs. So yeah, it's my job to source the material, get it seen by the right people, find out if they want to use it on the screen. In a way that's the easy bit, and then you have to start the clearances. 

In drama, your clearances and permissions have to be 100% watertight. And I realised on documentaries how much, you know, we sort of winged it. It's different, documentaries have an educational side to them and a news side to them. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Victoria Stable: Whereas drama is commercial and it's entertainment 

Edith Bowman: And most of the time it's a kind of creative licence around how it's, how that footage might be used.

Victoria Stable: People want script pages, they want to know context. We might have an actor standing in front of it saying, ‘I don't like this.’ Whereas everybody wants their clips to shine. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Victoria Stable: We had to, the Royal Family documentary and everyone's sitting on the sofa. The Royal Family are sitting on the sofa watching, actually, a fantastic bit of ‘Tomorrow's World’. It’s on for about a minute and a half. ‘Tomorrow's World’ is saying how one day there will be a home computer in everybody's house. It's actually a fantastic item, but, the Royal Family, and I think it's Princess Margaret says, ‘You know, this is really boring. How do you expect us to enjoy this?’, and Prince Phillip gets cross and everything, .

But in fact, ‘Tomorrow's World’ didn't want people saying it was boring. But of course, I mean, it was 1969. It was a black and white and it was quite dry. But anyway, they said yes in the end.

Edith Bowman: Did the cast approach you as well for, for, you know, their research purposes? 

Victoria Stable: Sometimes, yes. I mean, in season five, Khallid Abdalla who plays Dodi.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Victoria Stable: There's no footage, there's so little footage of Dodi. I certainly hadn't found anything of him speaking. Khallid sent me a random photograph he'd found online and you could see a news camera. He was being interviewed somewhere and I sort of worked it out. Long before he ever met Diana, he was in a court case in Toronto and you know, again, I was looking through old back copies of the Toronto Star and things like that.

But anyway, there was. there was this court case and the day he came out of court, I think he was just giving evidence or something. Somebody interviewed him anyway, got this little bit, there was only five seconds of him speaking, but we did find it. 

Edith Bowman: Wow. 

Victoria Stable: So that's always useful, you know? 

Edith Bowman: That's amazing. 

Victoria Stable: He does speak!

Edith Bowman: Can we talk about episode eight ‘Gunpowder’? Because this is talking about the media landscape and change for the Royals. War of the Wales's pushes the kind of... the private conflict with the public and tabloid intrusion goes in it overdrive really. It's interesting to see that kind of royal relationship with the media threaded throughout this whole journey of ‘The Crown’, really, and how that's changed.

Tell us a little bit about sourcing the huge amount of footage that we see in this episode, which gives such rich context. 

Victoria Stable: Episode eight certainly was the most challenging on this season for me. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah? 

Victoria Stable: The ‘Panorama’ of course, you know, had very little to do with me in that I had a copy of the program, so that was fine.

Let everybody get on with that, hand that over to production and the sort of the War of the Wales's and the media war, there have been really excellent documentaries made in the last 15 years about that. And so, I could just hand over the documentaries for reference. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Victoria Stable: They can watch that and then they can come back and say, ‘We're gonna make a big deal about this scene.’

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Victoria Stable: Then I can go and see what else there is. So, that's sort of that element to it. And the bit that stumped me most, I suppose, Peter's - Morgan's - very keen on these, he loves these international news montages 

Edith Bowman: Yeah, which we see when the after ‘Panorama’ came out. Yeah. 

Victoria Stable: Yes. They're very difficult to put together because not all countries have archives.

You know, they're expensive to keep up and catalogue. Not all countries, I mean, although Diana was a phenomenon around the world and everybody would film her. They don't necessarily archive things. News broadcasts...People don't see the point in keeping the news reader, they will keep the inserts, the shot footage.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Victoria Stable: And actually now, fashions have changed. And we do like the newscaster cuz they have the urgency, they can move the story along. They're absolutely great, the newscasters, but a lot of them have been dumped and tapes have been reused. It's sort of luck. You don't know whether it exists or not until you ask.

Edith Bowman: And then you've got that brilliant scene where William’s helping the Queen navigate her new TV, satellite TV channels. 

Victoria Stable: That's, that's a terrifying scene. It was always sitting there in the script. One element of that that I'm most pleased with really, I suppose, is the ‘Beavis and Butthead’ clip. Because, just to kick off, I obviously had to go to Mike Judge, who's the creator and animator of ‘Beavis and Butthead’, and he also does the voices, and he had to get it. He had to understand that obviously Queen Elizabeth wasn't going to be into ‘Beavis and Butthead’ and would be fairly shocked and think it was pretty revolting. But he got that,  and he thought it was fun to be involved. 

Whereas there were other companies that… you know, I went to them because I wanted trashy, vulgar television. But you can't ask for that. You have to say, you know…

Edith Bowman: Yeah.

Victoria Stable: Yeah. You know,.... I mean, there are so many clips that go through really. Often only I know what it is. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Edith Bowman: I was more than excited to meet the fantastic actor bringing one of British television's most controversial broadcasters to life in this episode.

I asked Prasanna Puwanarajah about his journey to being cast as Martin Bashir.

Prasanna Puwanarajah: It's such an iconic show, I think, first of all. As a piece of fiction, first and foremost, it's extraordinary and brilliantly produced and made and you know, but it is kind of, it's beginning to be our living memory.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: For more and more of the nation. And so those kinds of roles are incredibly rare, particularly as a brown person, they're incredibly rare. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: To the tune of essentially them never really coming up. So nothing about this part coming up for me had ever really happened before playing a person who was as kind of multiply shaped, I guess. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: As this. But also someone who is very much in our national story. 

Edith Bowman: Still is as well. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Still is, yeah. So, it was first and foremost, it was an audition and there's always a kind of, I mean they, with the audition, it sort of said, this isn't about doing impersonations on this show.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: You know, and I, I sort of took that to mean like, it's about finding like motivations and the spirit of scenes and.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: People and.

Edith Bowman: And actions. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Yeah. And, and finding the reality that you can perceive within those things. And then you're sort of doing a kind of a kind of archaeological job, I think. 

Edith Bowman: Kind of sculpting it, aren't you?

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Yeah. You're going like, ‘This is what I think the bones of it are’. And that's all you get. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: And you have to work out the sinew and everything else from that. So, a lot of it is about trying to work out why things are happening. But also, a lot of it is about, like, watching a lot of his other work. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah.

Prasanna Puwanarajah: And it's not actually how an individual sounds or how they move. It's about their strategies. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: In, in an interview, you know? You know, you're a pro in this space. Like it's a kind of jousting in a way, in those sorts of spaces. It's about, it's like fencing.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: He is really good at it. And watching the interview again, watching his other interviews from the nineties, each interview has a moment of a pretty startling hit, I guess. And moments where also an easily expressible reality is not expressed. So he just, you know, there's a kind of hold and give. Like fly fishing or something. And so it was, it's actually kind of trying to map all of those things. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Really as well as finding a physical centre. It's a sort of combination of things, yeah. But so, all of that really from the audition time, and then when I got the gig, it was kind of getting into that in a very indepth way and then costume fittings and hair and makeup tests were, it is quite a transformation, but not in a sort of adding loads kind of way.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: It was a, it's a sort of very strange... 

Edith Bowman: It's really subtle. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Yeah, it is. 

Edith Bowman: But really distinctive. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: I think so, yeah. And it was an amazing job that the hair and makeup artists and the costume designers did, in particular, Lucy Oswald, who was the hair and makeup artist who I worked with every single day, who spent an hour every day.

Edith Bowman: Wow.

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Unbelievably making almost every single hair stand up on end using a little toothbrush in a kind of black lacquer.  

Edith Bowman: Wow. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Yeah. 

Edith Bowman: With the character that Peter has created from I guess the framework of the real person, within that, you've gotta find what you perceive as the motivation. You know, you mentioned that earlier. What did you see that being? 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: I think there's a lot of things in that primarily, I sort of perceived it from a kind of acting point of view, just sort of going, this is about trying to acquire a target and everything that he does is in pursuit of that acquisition. 

Edith Bowman: With regards to your character, he's either lying or manipulating the truth so much within what we see and it's, it's so interesting to watch to try and find the truths in a way, to try and find the real him, to try and kind of find when he's not being that person that he thinks, the people that he needs to convince, want him to be.

Prasanna Puwanarajah: What you've gotta do is you've gotta decide what you think the untruth is, and you've got to decide where that sits in a kind of landscape of a bigger truth and what the importance of that bigger truth is. And pulling against that as you like, work the pistons as, as an actor.  

Edith Bowman: Yeah.

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Is what are the things holding this person back? What's the drag coefficient? 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Which for him is, he's an outsider. In my perception of him, he's a young person in the context of, you know, quite an old.

Edith Bowman: Old establishment,

Prasanna Puwanarajah: An old, white established bandwidth within journalism. And so, there's a certain amount of peddling that is always happening underneath that surface.

Edith Bowman: Treading water, isn't he? 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Yeah. Well it's actually more than treading water. There's a motor running. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: At all, at all times. There's a sort of sense of, at any point anyone could say, Well, why? I mean, in fact this is actually stated to him like, ‘Why does she wanna do this with you?’ Which really articulates I think everything that he does.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Because that question is so sort of. I mean, it's absolutely nakedly articulated in the episodes, but it's, you know, for a relative unknown…

Edith Bowman: It's weighted, isn't it? 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: …to land that, To land that interview, it's a question of interest. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. Yeah. There's one moment where you kind of get a little flicker, I think. I mean, there are lots, It's lovely to watch and try and find those moments, but when the producer signals across the office that, had the sign off of the interview. It's like a kid at Christmas, like ‘I got the present I wanted’ kind of thing, and then quickly kind of like, Okay, back in the room.

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Yeah. That was a very interesting day that actually, because we all went out to Basingstoke, to an office that had been dressed from scratch to be the ‘Panorama’ offices. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, yeah, some people get to go to sort of Spain…Here we are in Basingstoke.’

Edith Bowman: Amazing. Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Yeah. Good old ‘Amazing-Stoke’. Yeah.

Edith Bowman: Love the M3. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Yeah. It was like when there was, a moment where they sort of said, ‘Do you want to test out the vehicle that you'll be driving?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And, we sort of walked along this row of cars that's this really beautiful old Aston Martin there, and they were like, ‘No, no, it's that.’ And it was a white transit van. Yeah, that's more like it.

Edith Bowman: The fact that that happened that they kind of, you know, or were just delivering her telly, or speakers Hi-Fi, wasn't it? Kind of, it's bonkers!

Prasanna Puwanarajah: They were supposed to be from, they were supposed to be from Dixon's, I think. And, and that was, that was the way of getting the equipment in. It was on November 5th, and the feeling was the place would be empty. 

Edith Bowman: Has so many connotations, doesn't it? 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: So many connotations. Yeah. And I think this is one of the things about Peter and this show is he's always running multiple horses at once, and so it's not a pair of episodes about that interview. It's a pair of episodes about unrest and about how unrest is expressed or not, or how inexpressible it is particularly in positions of power, when that power feels like it's under threat. It's kind of brilliant to be able to weave in that legacy. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah.

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Which is provocative. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Isn't it? Plus the shifts in the television broadcast landscape at that time, all of those things are this kind of incredible weave.

Edith Bowman: It's really emotional watching her - Elizabeth's - performance of this on screen.

Prasanna Puwanarajah: It was very emotional being in the room with it, actually. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. I mean, doing that interview in particular.

Prasanna Puwanarajah: It was all up at Elstree and they'd built a setup there and we went in there for a day and filmed some sort of bits and pieces, you know, bringing the kit in and stuff. But at the start of the day, we were just sort of hovering, kind of waiting and, and suddenly Elizabeth was there next to me, she said ‘Hello’ and I kind of turned around and it genuinely just sort of, it was quite startling, I think, because how old would I have been? You know, mid teens? 

Edith Bowman: Yeah.

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Mid to late teens.

Edith Bowman: It's there, isn't it? 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: Yeah. It was a, it was really the first kind of all nation event of my life, certainly. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: And of course, we experienced it collectively in a very different way, didn't we? It wasn't sort of in our phones, in a kind of like, audience of one. It was…

Edith Bowman: Communal. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: It was, it was communal. It was a, you know, And so there was a kind of flooding back of something I think.

I mean, Erik actually did a snip together of the sections of the interview that we filmed. To actually have on the screens when the other characters were watching the interview live in the episode. 

Edith Bowman: Oh, wow. That's clever. 

Prasanna Puwanarajah: So that, you know, so that you're not there kind of making faces at an empty television, which is kind of, sort of what you do every other time. So it was, it was, yeah, it was amazing to, to have done it and…

Edith Bowman: Thanks Erik.

Prasanna Puwanarajah: And one of the actors watching it cried. You know, I don't wanna say who because it's not for me to say, but, I think just the emotional hit of it is, is still real. 

Bashir: What impact did the illness have on your marriage?

Diana: Well, it gave people a marvellous new label to pin on me: ‘Diana’s crazy’. ‘Diana should be sent to a home’. But what better way to break down a personality than by isolating it?

Erik Richter Strand: Well, it's obviously the sort of the cornerstone of both my two episodes is the interview, the filming of it, and then eventually the broadcast of it.

And because it's such an iconic piece of historic television footage that so many people have seen - and remember - it was challenging sort of for a director to find, ‘Okay, how do I do this?’ 

You can, you cannot just copy it. But you have to make it clearly, similarly, you know, you need to be able to see immediately what it is and feel that you are living it this time. You're not just watching Diana, you're watching how it may have been for her to experience it. Right?

So, we made a version of that interview that was dealing with the points of our episode. 

Erik Richter Strand: Sort of a bit of a highlight reel where we took the points that we felt like were most important. We had to tweak them slightly verbally so we couldn't completely copy what was being said. So, it's a bit of a tweak to make it just legally correct for us to use.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Erik Richter Strand: And then just working with Elizabeth on, on how she delivers it so that she doesn't feel like she's mimicking someone, but actually feeling the emotions of the script. 

So, on the day we filmed it, one camera would be set up in the way that it captured exactly the image that you would normally expect to see in the interview because it has the same framing. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Erik Richter Strand: And then we had a lot of the cameras that filmed everything around it where you'd see the camera man and you see Martin Bashir and you see the lights and you'd see the room and you can go in and add a bit of camera movement to maybe see if you can get a bit closer into.

Edith Bowman: Yeah.

Erik Richter Strand: The person behind the image you see on television. That was also one of the very first things we filmed, the interview was. I wanted it to be early on cuz I didn't want Elizabeth to be worrying about it throughout our filming. Also, for me to know that we had what we needed in case we needed to go back, get something more.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Erik Richter Strand: And then of course, for all the scenes in which I'm filming, other members of our cast watching the interview at the end of episode eight, they could actually watch some of it. They could see what they were reacting to and not just looking at a green screen, which is normally the case. And then when Elizabeth was watching herself, when Diana is watching herself on the couch, we tried a number of different reactions that could still all feel valid.

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Erik Richter Strand: There could be a sense of instant regret, there could be a sense of perhaps thinking that this could go her way. She may have done a right choice, and then eventually just feeling that she may have made a terrible mistake. And that all plays back to another scene between her and, and the Queen, which has gone just before the, the broadcast of the interview where, where, yeah, the Queen pretty much tells her that you shouldn't do this.

Edith Bowman: How did you shoot that? Cause it feels almost like theatrical. It feels like a sort of mini play in a way as well. 

Erik Richter Strand: Yes. It's a beautiful piece of writing from Peter Morgan and it is a wonderful two-hander, sort of one act climax in a way. I didn't shoot that in different ways. I was pretty clear about what I wanted and I think the actors had a clear idea of that as well.

Interesting thing in that scene for me is that Diana goes into it with a clear agenda to ask for an audience with the Queen to tell her about the interview and in a way sort of set the record straight, ‘I had to do this and you made me do it.’ And in the end, she leaves that scene feeling that she must have, she probably made a terrible mistake and the Queen is never really going to understand. And it's heartbreaking. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. It really is. 

Erik Richter Strand: Yeah. So I love that. And as one of those scenes where, for me...Two things: for Imelda, it's finding the right tone. She needs to be stern. She needs to take control and find the right tone for her sternness and for her, her, her strength in a close up. And then for Elizabeth Debicki, it's doing very little, but doing it perfectly.

Just staying with her and allowing the impact of what, what Imelda is saying to land on her face. 

Edith Bowman: Because we've seen this lovely relationship flourish between the Queen and William, and obviously he talks about his mom and so the Queen is privy to his concerns about her, and I feel like almost the Queen has that knowledge there and is slightly more gentle with her than maybe she would normally be.

Erik Richter Strand: No, it's interesting you would interpret in that way cuz the Queen has no idea why Diana's asked to come and see her. She sees, in the previous scene when Robert Fellows comes in and says, ‘The Princess of Wales's asked for an urgent meeting, could it be even this afternoon?’, the Queen clocks William's reaction that he immediately feels like he has to go.

She might have a sense that William might know what this is about, or at least that he doesn't want to be anywhere near it. 

Edith Bowman: Yeah. 

Erik Richter Strand: So, she goes into that meeting with Diana, I think with a sense that this is not good news. But she does know what it is. She has no idea. So, when Diana says ‘I've given an interview’, you can immediately see that land on Imelda's face and she's gonna be stoic. She's gonna be, ‘Is he okay?’ She's gonna ask questions and she's gonna tell Diana exactly what she feels. 

Edith Bowman: I'm Edith Bowman, and my special thanks to our guests on this episode, Prasanna Puwanarajah, Erik Rickter Strand, Annie Sulzberger, and Victoria Stable.

‘The Crown: The Official Podcast’ is produced by Netflix and Somethin’ Else, in association with Left Bank Pictures. Join us next time when we go behind the scenes of episode nine of season five, called ‘Couple 31.’

The Queen asks the Prime Minister to step in when Prince Charles and Princess Diana's divorce negotiations go sour. Meanwhile, newly divorced Camilla Parker Bowles begins to shape her own royal future. 

… Mark Bolland : That’s what we’re talking about isn’t it? Standing here in this terraced house, in the middle of Islington, watching someone clamp your boyfriend's car, you being Queen. 

Camilla Parker- Bowles: Look, I never wanted any of that.