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Back in the early Seventies, Nasa decided that its Voyager space telescope would carry with it a gold-plated record full of the sights, sounds and feelings of Earth.
There was music by Beethoven, Mozart, Chuck Berry and Louis Armstrong. There were pictures of people eating ice cream, details of the species on Earth and the makeup of our atmosphere, as well as recordings of languages from across the world.
Basically, I’ve always thought of Netflix’s The Crown as a Voyager record for Britain in the 20th century, with a very Boomerish bent to the peripheral characters who stake out who and what was important to us: Tony Blair, Beyond the Fringe, John Betjeman, Arthur Scargill.
The Crown has taken the bits of British history that nobody outside of the UK usually gives much thought to, and turned them into teachable moments about how the crumbling of an empire still freaks our collective nut out to this day.
Sometimes it’s tragedies like the spoil tip collapse at Aberfan which killed 144 people, or it’s something like the slow decline of Winston Churchill to a diminished, out-maneouvred relic. Sometimes it’s Prince Philip wishing he could fly into space.
Yes, as we’ve got closer to the present day the whole thing has felt more and more Hallmark in its look and feel. (If you’ve got 90 minutes to spare ahead of season six, definitely give William and Catherine: A Royal Romance a go. It’s like watching Hollyoaks, just with fewer serial killers.) But now that filming for the final season is underway it’s a reminder that this is a chance – indeed, The Crown’s final chance – to etch something else in the golden record. Part of that etching will be Prince William and Kate Middleton’s courtship at St Andrews university just after the millennium.
Pictures show Ed McVey, who’s playing William, in an Oxford shirt and blue sweatshirt combo standing next to Dominic West as his dad Charles. There’s also some snaps of McVey with Meg Bellamy as Kate as the pair go on some kind of night out among the bright lights of St Andrews.
Theirs is, on one level – on nearly every conceivable level, in fact – an insane and strange and completely abnormal kind of a relationship. But on another of those levels, it’s intensely normal. They met in university halls, for one thing.
“I went bright red when I met you and sort of scuttled off, feeling very shy about meeting you,” Kate said in a joint interview with William some years later.
Apparently they bonded over breakfast. He loved muesli and fruit; she loved fruit and muesli. It was meant to be. They moved into a shared house together, and by the end of their degrees they were an item. There are pictures of William wearing some absolutely terrifying stone coloured cord flares with brown suede loafers.
So far, so 2001 couple goals. But the uni experience is a big part of why we are the way we are. Last academic year there were 2.86 million students at higher education establishments in the UK, and 680,000 of them came from around the world to study here. Obviously The Crown isn’t a documentary, but the very least it could do is show Americans what a real British uni experience is.
Let’s start with Wills and Kate’s digs. Television and film would generally have you think that students are either complex geniuses with dorms from the late 1500s (see dramas set at Oxbridge colleges) or scruffy messes who live in holes in the ground and never do anything (everything else).
Students now are not the students of The Young Ones anymore though. They’re not even the students from Fresh Meat anymore. The grotty student flat is a particular anachronism these days, though, as more and more people go for eyeball-bleedingly expensive purpose-built blocks.
But in the same way period dramas use certain objects as shorthand for a particular time and place – a chip bag from Wimpy here, a kipper tie there – there are a few things which still denote a student flat. IKEA’s two-person Klippan sofa and Lack coffee table with an extra shelf underneath. Off-cream walls. Balsa wood doors. Flooring which looks like laminate but is actually pine effect linoleum. Ideally, Wills and Kate would pop round to their mate’s for tea (spag bol with cheddar on top) and eat with plates on their knees because there’s no dining table.
Sadly William gave his Freshers Week a miss on the grounds that he’d be a bit of a distraction, and at any rate St Andrews’ 2001 edition doesn’t sound particularly representative. The big highlight seems to have been ‘Raisin Week’, where undergrads threw shaving foam at each other. No, The Crown should have the happy couple lock eyes at a sparsely attended Daphne and Celeste gig, as someone dribbles a two-pint pot of Frosty Jack’s cider down Wills’ leg.
You know what it’s going to look like. There’ll be loving shots of St Andrews’ cloisters and quad, and the beach from Chariots of Fire, and maybe a night in a cosy wood-panelled pub. The uni will look like an extension of the rarefied places the royals inhabit elsewhere.
But The Crown’s not just a golden record out to the universe. It’s a time capsule filled with the bits of the last century which meant something to us too. And if I don’t see at least one confused teenager in a hurriedly customised Carnage pub crawl shirt texting her mates, it’ll be a missed opportunity to immortalise a way of life which was undoubtedly slightly shit – but at least it was our shade of slightly shit.
