Peter Morgan, the creator and writer of The Crown, has recalled going to Buckingham Palace to receive a CBE for services to drama – and said that it was ‘even madder’ than fiction.
Speaking in California in advance of the launch of the sixth and final series of the show in Netflix, he said that the costumes and protocol had seemed bizarre and alien.
Morgan, whose father was a German Jew who fled the Nazis for the UK, said: ‘I had to go to the Palace for an occasion and when I went there, I thought: I don’t understand this at all.
‘It seems even madder than what we do! And there was grown men with spurs and everyone was in a funny costume and they were bowing.
Stars: Peter Morgan and Elizabeth Debicki attend the Los Angeles premiere of Netflix’s The Crown Season 6 Part 1 on November 12
Royal: Screenwriter Morgan is made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire
‘They bamboozle you with the protocol and you walk in and you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re paralyzed.’
Morgan was presented with the honour by King Charles and later recalled that Charles had said to him: ‘Scriptwriting isn’t so easy, is it?’ He added: ‘I tend to think it’s not what you leave in but what you leave out that’s most important.’
At that point Morgan had written The Deal about the Brown Blair pact and had also written The Queen, starring Helen Mirren, and focusing on the days directly after the death of Princess Diana.
This series of The Crown includes the death of the Princess and concludes with the marriage of Charles to Camilla Parker Bowles.
Morgan said: ‘The joy and the thing that I already miss is writing about a multi generational family. It’s the best thing for a writer to write about it because it’s the thing that binds all of us together, and the shared human experience and the challenges of living within a family and how the different generations of a family interact.
‘Mad’: Morgan said: ‘I had to go to the Palace for an occasion and when I went there, I thought: I don’t understand this at all’
‘I’m very grateful to them because it’s given me a fantastic opportunity to write about a family in a uniquely interesting set of circumstances.’
He concluded: ‘The now Queen was I suppose a bit – if you look historically – a bit like Wallis Simpson, and I think Charles has taken to the role extremely well. He seems to be a very confident, relaxed King and she seems now to be very confident, relaxed Queen – and he hasn’t put a foot wrong. That doesn’t mean that weren’t difficult times – but because of the strength of feeling that there was for Diana and the sense of injustice.
‘It was an equal opportunity, suffering because he was denied the woman that he almost married. With time, opinions softened and changed and respect was earned. And she now, I have to say, in the United Kingdom. She’s a very popular queen, I think.’
