The Crown’s head of research calls out criticism of the show's historical accuracy: ‘Collective memory is inaccurate’

Yahoo UK

Annie Sulzberger reflects on the work she and her team put into building a base for the Netflix series and why it&#39;s &quot;frustrating&quot; for the accuracy to be questioned.

Transcript

00:00 For you, the show has been called up

00:01 on its historical accuracy over the years,

00:03 and there's a lot of debate around

00:05 the way the show approaches the royal family

00:07 and their story, and I wondered,

00:09 for you as the head of research,

00:11 how does that feel, and how do you want to tackle that?

00:15 - The way that we've approached the show

00:16 has always remained the same,

00:17 so our tactics have never shifted.

00:19 We always start the outlining process from research.

00:24 That is how Peter has always intended

00:25 for the show to function,

00:26 and that's how we've done it from the beginning.

00:28 In the beginning, it was just five of us,

00:30 and two and a half of us were on research,

00:33 so you can tell where his emphasis was, really, at the start.

00:36 In the beginning, it felt so removed.

00:40 Nobody questioned it.

00:41 Those decisions, which have not been changed,

00:44 and those tactics that have not been changed,

00:46 it never really occurred to people,

00:49 like, oh, is this exactly how it happened,

00:52 or is this some creative license

00:54 because this is a fictional drama,

00:56 and Peter's decided to put his own spin on something,

01:00 and now that we've reached into collective memory,

01:03 which is as inaccurate, if not more, I would say,

01:08 than many of the decisions that we've ever made,

01:11 to stray from history, it's just become much harder

01:15 because you take Diana's death, for example.

01:18 Most people, their memories of that incident

01:22 stop with the information they received in 1997.

01:25 That's a very flawed place to stop

01:30 because it isn't until the inquiries

01:33 and the inquests are published in 2008,

01:35 they go all the way to 2008,

01:37 that we actually gained the information we needed

01:39 to recreate the events of 1997

01:41 because that's when witness testimonies were published.

01:44 That's when the Met Police vetted

01:47 the people who were telling their stories.

01:49 What we find is un-Google-able, I would say it.

01:52 We are knee-deep in National Archives research,

01:56 we have confidential sources,

01:58 we vet not only the kind of history,

02:01 but the source it comes from,

02:03 so we actively research the journalists who are reporting,

02:07 who their conduits of information are,

02:09 directly from the palace, or in this series,

02:12 the Fayyad family, for example.

02:13 When you see those particularly true and false

02:16 kind of articles, unfortunately, a lot of those are wrong

02:19 because they haven't done the depth of research

02:21 that we have been able to

02:23 by having five full-time researchers for 10 years.

02:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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