David Lammy had the best response to a Tory minister asking Netflix to label The Crown as fiction

By now you and everyone else you know have watched season 4 of The Crown on Netflix and marveled at what a stunning 'work of fiction' it is. That's right, fiction.

According to the government's culture secretary Oliver Dowden, the show should be labelled as a piece of fiction despite it focusing on the Royal Family and events that actually happened to them throughout their respective lives.

That being said, The Crown’s latest season has taken some creative license and has been accused of being inaccurate. Some scenes in particular, such as the tumultuous marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, have faced particular criticism.

In an interview with the Mail on Sunday, Dowden demanded that Netflix makes it clear to their viewers that The Crown isn't a show based on facts to avoid any confusion or mistakes.

It's a beautifully produced work of fiction, so as with other TV productions, Netflix should be very clear at the beginning it is just that. Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.

The response to this request from Dowden that a show which is quite clearly a drama should be clearly labelled as fiction has prompted a baffled response as anyone who has watched it would have recognised that some interactions and pieces of dialogue were fabricated. That, or the writers of the show had access to some sort of Royal archive which documented literally everything they had ever done and said.

The internet was soon awash with ridicule for Dowden’s demands at Netflix as we’d hope most people who would have watched it would recognise that it wasn’t the actual Royal Family on their screens.

Possibly the best response was from Labour’s shadow secretary for justice David Lammy, who used the story to take a pop at the Conservative Party and Boris Johnson’s recent performances at prime minister questions which have tended to warp the line between fact and fiction as much as The Crown does.

We’ll let you make of that what you like. No need for a ‘fact or fiction’ warning here.

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