The Crown: The secrets behind multi-million pound Netflix production

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2 years ago

December 1, 2023

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The second instalment of the sixth series of The Crown is set for release on 14 December.

Seven years on from its initial release, the programme has been a smash hit for Netflix and has seen some of the UK’s greatest acting talent – including the three queens Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton – take on the challenge of portraying some of the most recognisable people in the world.

Behind the glitzy multimillion-pound production is a vast production team working on the finest of details to capture each decade of the Royal Family precisely.

Martin Childs, a production designer, and Alison Harvey, a set decorator, have worked on all six seasons of the show and produced almost 2,500 sets in that time.

The pair say the “luxury of time and money and people” that the Netflix production affords allows the detailed and spectacular sets we see on our screens.

“We did go through the schedule quite quickly,” Harvey said.

“We did have people devoted to certain things like drapes. [I’m] on a job at the moment – we’ve got no people and no money and no time. So we’re very lucky to have those facilities available to us on such a great well-received project.”

The abundance of resources allows Childs and Harvey to capture not just the familiar castles and regal settings – they were excited to capture the royals’ private interiors as well.

“It’s a kind of a slightly imagined film version,” Harvey said.

“We research and research and research until the research runs out,” Childs said.

“I think it might be Peter Morgan who coined this phrase ‘informed imagination’ – and it’s one I like very much because it helps describe what we finish up having to do,” he added.

The first four episodes of the sixth season were released on 16 November and captured the last eight weeks of Princess Diana’s life.

While many of the scenes from the 1997 crash and its aftermath are seared into the public’s imagination, Childs was averse to recreating many of them.

“My consideration [for] all the scenes that led up to [the crash] was not to have any prior knowledge of it, because the audience does. So I didn’t want to load it with 20-20 hindsight.

“People know what happened. People are familiar with the footage so we didn’t really want to recreate much of that.”

Portraying Diana faithfully was also a major consideration for hair and makeup artists Cate Hall and Emilie Yong. It took around 30 hours to transform Elizabeth Debicki into the late princess.

“It starts with this very archaic wrapping of their head in clingfilm and sellotape and marking the headline with a sharpie. The wig maker we work with is very, very detailed in terms of hairlines, crowns,” Hall said.

“The hair is all knotted hair by hair, we will go through thousands of different colours to find the four or five colours we’re going to use in a wig. Then once the wig is made, we start cutting.

“Then the wig comes off the head and is set and dried, put back on again, cut, highlighted, roots shaded in. And then the makeup fittings start.”

Like the production designers, the pair said they “live and die by” getting the details right.

“Otherwise what you get is something that feels sort of generally in the region of [the decade] but not necessarily robust.

“The whole point when you’re recreating period television is trying to create this world that the viewer can watch and really immerse themselves in. The last thing you want to do is bring them out of that.

“So for me, if I’m watching a TV show and the textures are really modern and chemically sophisticated and illuminated, things like that immediately take me out of the show. So it’s those kinds of details.

“One way of saying we’re in the 1960s [is] about the textures and what was available to the people at the time. Glitter was not. We have every foundation colour under the sun now. But in 1960 you were probably dealing with four different shades if you’re lucky. It’s about sophistication that helps you tell the story,” Hall said.

So the actors have undergone their transformations into their characters and the stage is set but something’s missing.

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Alongside a historical research team, the actors spend a significant amount of time preparing with movement coach Polly Bennett to prepare for filming.

“When you meet new actors playing the characters, it becomes about actually trying to throw all of that information [from past seasons] away and starting again.

“The best thing about working with the team this time around was that we’d already done season five, so they kind of lived in their bodies,” she said.

“I think the biggest thing physically that I had to consider was that they had been around being famous. Being famous was a new idea.

“The sort of thing that Diana was experiencing is a very particular physical change in her body. So that was the major preoccupation I had.”

A huge body of research, like the production designers and hair and make-up artists, informs Bennetts’s work.

She describes working with 21-year-old Meg Bellamy who is playing a young Kate Middleton as she attends university with Prince William.

“A lot of our first sessions were just providing the space to go – who is this person? What has she been around? What has she grown up around? What clothes is she regularly wearing? What food does she eat? What are her relationships? Who has she seen growing up?

“We look at footage that we have, we look at photographs, and put it together in the kind of private investigator type way,” Bennett said.

“And suddenly when you start looking at different pictures, you notice little things that Kate does in her life, like she wears a handbag always on the same side of her body and she clutches it. Now, that’s something that then became an inpoint for Meg.

“The idea that they’ve got something very practical, but they’re keeping it close to them and then you can take that feeling into their whole life. Whether or not that’s actually what Kate Middleton is doing, that becomes gold dust as a practical idea for an actor to play.”

Entertainment

The Stone Roses bassist Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield dies aged 63

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1 day ago

November 20, 2025

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The Stone Roses bassist Gary 'Mani' Mounfield dies aged 63

The Stone Roses bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield has died at the age of 63, his family has said.

Mani’s brother, Greg, said in a post on Facebook: “It is with the heaviest of hearts that I have to announce the sad passing of my brother.”

“RIP RKID,” he added.

Formed in 1983, The Stone Roses were a mainstay of the “Madchester” scene.

Mani joined the band in 1987 and formed part of its classic line-up alongside singer Ian Brown, guitarist John Squire and drummer Alan ‘Reni’ Wren. He remained with the group until their split in 1996.

Mani’s death comes two years after that of his wife, Imelda Mounfield, who was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer in November 2020. The couple welcomed twin boys in 2012.

The Stone Roses frontman Brown shared a tribute online, writing: “REST IN PEACE MANi X.”

Oasis singer Liam Gallagher said he was “in total shock and absolutely devastated”, describing the bassist as “my hero”.

“RIP Mani – my heartfelt condolences to his twin boys and all of his family,” wrote the Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder, whose bandmate Rowetta added: “Back with your Imelda, Mani. Going to miss you so much. All my love to the boys, the family & all those who knew & loved him.”

The Charlatans frontman, Tim Burgess, shared a photo of himself with Mani, writing alongside it: “I shared this photo a week or so ago on Mani’s birthday.

“It never failed to bring a smile to my face – and that was exactly the same for the man himself.

“One of the absolute best in every way – such a beautiful friend.”

Echo & the Bunnymen vocalist Ian McCulloch said Mani was someone “who I have always loved and always will love, deeply and forever. Like a brother”.

He continued: “I am in shock to be honest. Please tell me I’m just having a bad, bad dream. My thoughts and feelings and Mani. Love to all of his family from me”.

The “Madchester” bands were known for blending indie with acid house, psychedelia, and pop.

The Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album of 1989 was a huge success, and was named the second greatest album of all time in a “Music of the Millennium” poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian, and Classic FM.

Entertainment

Half of novelists fear AI will replace them entirely, survey finds

Published

2 days ago

November 20, 2025

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Half of novelists fear AI will replace them entirely, survey finds

The novel has survived the industrial revolution, radio, television, and the internet. Now it’s facing artificial intelligence – and novelists are worried.

Half (51%) fear that they will be replaced by AI entirely, according to a new survey, even though for the most part they don’t use the technology themselves.

More immediately, 85% say they think their future income will be negatively impacted by AI, and 39% claim their finances have already taken a hit.

Tracy Chevalier, the bestselling author of Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Glassmaker, shares that concern.

“I worry that a book industry driven mainly by profit will be tempted to use AI more and more to generate books,” she said in response to the survey.

“If it is cheaper to produce novels using AI (no advance or royalties to pay to authors, quicker production, retainment of copyright), publishers will almost inevitably choose to publish them.

“And if they are priced cheaper than ‘human made’ books, readers are likely to buy them, the way we buy machine-made jumpers rather than the more expensive hand-knitted ones.”

Why authors are so worried

The University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy asked 258 published novelists and 74 industry insiders how AI is viewed and used in the world of British fiction.

Alongside existential fears about the wholesale replacement of the novel, many authors reported a loss of income from AI, which they attributed to “competition from AI-generated books and the loss of jobs which provide supplementary streams of income, such as copywriting”.

Some respondents reported finding “rip-off AI-generated imitations” of their own books, as well books “written under their name which they haven’t produced”.

Last year, the Authors Guild warned that “the growing access to AI is driving a new surge of low-quality sham ‘books’ on Amazon”, which has limited the number of publications per day on its Kindle self-publishing platform to combat the influx of AI-generated books.

The median income for a novelist is currently £7,000 and many make ends meet by doing related work, such as audiobook narration, copywriting or ghost-writing.

These tasks, authors feared, were already being supplanted by AI, although little evidence was provided for this claim, which was not possible to verify independently.

Copyright was also a big concern, with 59% of novelists reporting that they knew their work had been used to train AI models.

Of these, 99% said they did not give permission and 100% said they were not remunerated for this use.

Earlier this year, AI firm Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5bn (£1.2bn) to settle a lawsuit which claimed the company stole their work.

The judge in the US court case ruled that Anthropic had downloaded more than seven million digital copies of books it “knew had been pirated” and ordered the firm to pay authors compensation.

However, the judge sided with Anthropic over the question of copyright, saying that the AI model was doing something akin to when a human reads a book to inspire new work, rather than simply copying.

Most novelists – 67% – never used it for creative work, although a few said they found it very useful for speeding up drafting or editing.

One case study featured in the report is Lizbeth Crawford, a novelist in multiple genres, including fantasy and romance. She describes working with AI as a writing partner, using it to spot plot holes and trim adjectives.

“Lizbeth used to write about one novel per year, but now she can do three per year, and her target is five,” notes the author of the report, Dr Clementine Collett.

Is there a role for government?

Despite this, the report’s foreword urges the government to slow down the spread of AI by strengthening copyright law to protect authors and other creatives.

The government has proposed making an exception to UK copyright law for “text and data mining”, which might make authors and other copyright holders opt out to stop their work being used to train AI models.

“That approach prioritises access to data for the world’s technology companies at the cost to the UK’s own creative industries,” writes Professor Gina Neff, executive director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

“It is both bad economics and a betrayal of the very cultural assets of British soft power.”

A government spokesperson said: “Throughout this process we have, and always will, put the interests of the UK’s citizens and businesses first.

“We’ve always been clear on the need to work with both the creative industries and AI sector to drive AI innovation and ensure robust protections for creators.

“We are bringing together both British and global companies, alongside voices beyond the AI and creative sectors, to ensure we can capture the broadest possible range of expert views as we consider next steps.”

Entertainment

Princess of Wales says her children were ‘very sad’ to miss Paddington at Royal Variety Performance

Published

2 days ago

November 20, 2025

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Princess of Wales says her children were 'very sad' to miss Paddington at Royal Variety Performance

The Princess of Wales has admitted her children were “very sad” to miss the Royal Variety Performance in London, which she and the Prince of Wales attended.

Prince William and Kate made their first appearance at the event since her recovery from cancer.

Wednesday’s red carpet show at the Royal Albert Hall was headlined by the cast of Paddington The Musical.

After arriving and being presented with posies by nine-year-old twins Emelia and Olivia Edwards, the family of staff at a care home for entertainment industry workers, Kate asked if they were fans of Paddington Bear.

The princess, wearing a green velvet gown, then told the girls that her children were “very sad” not to attend the show and added she had to tell them children were not allowed to go.

“My kiddies were very sad, we’re going to have to keep it a big secret that I saw you guys,” she said.

“They were very sad not to be joining us.”

It is the sixth time William and Kate have attended the annual charity event.

When Olivia told the prince, wearing a tuxedo, her favourite singer was Billie Eilish, he replied she had good taste.

He said: “It’s very nice to see you both. You’re very smiley, you two.”

The royals were also greeted on the red carpet by ITV board members and representatives from the Royal Variety Charity, of which the King is the royal patron.

The Paddington cast were set to take to the stage on Wednesday evening, while pop star Jessie J and Grammy award-winning singer Laufey were also expected to perform.

Held annually, the Royal Variety Performance was first staged in 1912 for King George V and Queen Mary in support of the charity, which helps those working in the entertainment industry.

Ahead of the show, its executive producer Giles Cooper said the charity was “thrilled” the prince and princess would “once again attend the Royal Variety Performance”.

Mr Cooper, also chairman of the charity, added: “This annual great British institution, viewed by a worldwide TV audience of over 150 million, continues to be a crucial fundraising event supporting people in all areas of performance, either on or off stage.

“In this pressurised world of working in the entertainment industry, our mental health initiative, started in 2024, has been a lifeline for many who are experiencing issues such as anxiety, depression or addiction.”

On Tuesday, the princess called on businesses to value “time and tenderness just as much as productivity and success” in her first speech since she was diagnosed with cancer at the start of 2024.

Speaking at the Future Workforce Summit, Kate told 80 business leaders: “Every one of you interacts with your own environment; a home, a family, a business, a workforce, a community.

“These are the ecosystems that you yourselves help to weave. Imagine a world where each of these environments were built on valuing time and tenderness just as much as productivity and success.

“As business leaders, you will face the daily challenge of finding the balance between profitability and having a positive impact. But the two are not, and should not be incompatible.”