The Crown, season 6 episode 7, Alma Mater, review: makes Carole Middleton into a monster matchmaker
Some people get a free pass in The Crown (Netflix). The Duke of York, for example, makes only fleeting appearances and escapes criticism. At the other end of the scale we have Carole Middleton, for whom this series will surely be mortifying.
It has long been suggested – in Tina Brown’s wonderfully gossipy The Palace Papers, for example – that Carole (Eve Best) orchestrated the relationship between her daughter Kate (Meg Bellamy) and Prince William (Ed McVey). Well, writer Peter Morgan has embraced that idea and then some. Carole is shameless in her engineering. Americans would call her a “momager”. The British might want to call social services, as Carole instructs her 15-year-old (at the start of this episode) to wear slinky dresses: “It’ll show off your figure, which the boys will love.”
On this shopping trip, they happen across Diana and William, who are standing in the street selling copies of the Big Issue. It’s a special moment for schoolgirl Kate, who has a Prince William scrapbook and a Prince William magazine collection. For Carole, it’s the beginning: eyes on the prize.
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When she hears that William is going to join an expedition in South America during his gap year, she enrols Kate on the same one. William ditching a place at Edinburgh University for St Andrews? Kate is made to do the same. When Kate comes home for the holidays with a perfectly nice boyfriend called Rupert, Carole can’t hide her crushing disappointment (good egg Michael Middleton, meanwhile, chats away to their guest and shares nothing of his wife’s social-climbing ways).
Harry (Luther Ford) is around 17 by this point and a sulky teen who scoffs at his brother and makes reference to the fact he’s in Charles’s bad books for smoking weed. The only flash of schoolboy humour is when he presents William with a condom as a going-away present, in front of the Queen and other royals (“Is it sweeties?” asks the Queen Mother). On the phone to William during his first term, he calls him a “frigid weirdo” and says: “University is just sex. Get stuck in. Sire some illegitimate b-----ds and alter the line of succession, or swallow some hallucinogenic mushrooms and have a fist fight with the local oiks.” Anything, Harry says, to stop him from being so “uptight, repressed, responsible and boring”.
Mercifully, we are spared any sex scenes, although we do see William being pushed onto a bed by an eager young lady at a student party. At other times, he sits in his bedroom watching Celebrity Big Brother and eating a Pot Noodle (the most depressing moment in this entire series).
Finally he meets Kate in the library, only for his then-girlfriend to turn up and call him “weirdly rage-aholic” when he snaps at someone trying to get his autograph. William says they don’t understand how awful it is to get lots of attention. “What – being ogled, looked at and judged constantly? Try being a girl,” harrumphs Kate, and the two ladies leave. The idea that Kate has spent a year dreaming of this exact “meet cute” but would then blow it to make a feminist point seems, shall we say, unlikely?
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