The brilliant Martin Childs offers insight into his design process and the making of one of the royal family’s most iconic eras of the modern age in the beloved, multi-Golden Globe-winning series.
Queen and Country Graham Hillard
The new season of
The Crown, Netflix’s peerless depiction of the second Elizabethan age, contains exactly one sympathetic character. Michael Fagan, an out-of-work painter on the verge of a mental breakdown, famously scaled the walls of Buckingham Palace on a summer evening in 1982. As played by the terrific Tom Brooke, Fagan makes his way to the queen’s bedroom and awakens her for a chat about the plight of the underclass. Plaintive, breathless, and more than a little disappointed by the shabbiness of the place, Fagan is a nonthreatening figure, the sort of bloke who might wheedle a free pint in a Clerkenwell pub. What he wants is something to which nearly everyone in her majesty’s orbit can relate: to be, at long last, understood.