From gin palaces to royal palaces, The Crown is the most opulent soap ever made: JAN MOIR’s view from the couch

What first attracted Princess Diana to multi-millionaire Dodi Fayed? That’s one of the many questions left unasked and unanswered in the new series of The Crown, released today.

We all have assumptions, we all have theories, we all have The Crown suggesting – as they do here – that Dodi was a weakling controlled by his puppeteer father, Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw).

It is the cunning, socially ambitious Mohamed who arranges the ill-fated hunting holiday that marks the beginning of the end for poor Diana.

It is Mohamed who urges Dodi to dump his awkward American fiancée; and it’s Mohamed who is helplessly dead and can’t sue The Crown for portraying him as a mangy fixer who crows about putting Diana “on a plate” for Dodi and urges his son to “seal the deal” .

Real? Uhm. In other chilling scenes from that pivotal holiday in the summer of 1997, Dodi (Khalid Abdalla) writes love poems and has his words engraved on a silver plaque, which he hands to an unimpressed Diana (Elizabeth Debicki).

‘A bit angry. Completely exaggerated,” she tells a friend on the phone.

Dodi even fails to read the room as Diana, glittering and lithe in a swimsuit, talks earnestly about her landmine campaign and the injuries suffered by many victims.

‘At least you still have your legs. Losing them would be a crime against humanity,” says Dodi, running a brutal hand over her thigh. It’s certainly a crime against screenwriting, although we’re more certain when Dodi proposes and Diana refuses.

“I can’t make your father love you more by becoming your wife,” she says.

Yet they head to Paris anyway, where the dreaded hand of history awaits.

Is that really what happened in the days leading up to the terrible events in the Alma Tunnel? No one knows for sure, which is the eternal problem of and for The Crown; a drama made for entertainment purposes that delves into recent events and effortlessly delves into the souls of both the dearly departed and the living.

Yes, the Royal Family are some of the most closely observed people on Earth, but when The Crown can’t go deeper than skin deep, when the flesh underneath isn’t available for examination, they just dig in and make it all up, it makes them no matter who they might injure.

To this day, no one knows for sure whether Dodi actually proposed to Diana, but his proposal is presented here as fact, without even a fig leaf of dramatic speculation.

Prince Harry, who is on Netflix’s payroll for other projects, appears relaxed about a show that portrays him as a glassy-eyed 12-year-old whose lifelong trauma over his mother’s untimely death is now being streamed into millions of homes.

Earlier this year, Harry claimed he had seen The Crown and ‘checked’ it out for himself. He said he didn’t mind if it was infringed because viewers understand it’s fiction.

I wish I had his faith in the popcorn-munching proles who will gobble this up like every word and scene is real.

Yet the storyline of this sixth and final series of The Crown is so powerful, the acting so delightful and the entire production so magnificent in every way, that it might be a little difficult to argue about who said what to whom on the All -Fayed Hunt or at Balmoral Castle. to miss the point.

From gin palace to royal palace, The Crown is the most lavish soap opera ever made, a big-budget psychodrama filled with more British Premier League actors than a Harry Potter film. Resistance to his charms is futile.

Yes, the incessant intrusions into the royal family’s most intimate moments and the imagined conversations concocted for dramatic purposes could be considered extremely tasteless, but at least The Crown has credit for the car crash in Paris and the events that follow with great sensitivity.

As the clock ticks inexorably towards the great unbearable, Debicki’s Diana – a luminous portrait of a woman in her prime – moves through Paris in scenes that are rivetingly familiar; as she slipped in and out of the Ritz in her white jeans, Dodi’s hand on the small of her back; that unmistakable cap of blond hair glimpsed through the window of a speeding car.

It’s downright terrifying.

But elsewhere I sense a hint of sadism in the way the royal family is depicted? There’s certainly no let-up here, with Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) still an unfeeling old brute and Princess Anne (Claudia Harrison) shoveling pureed pheasant into her royal gob before concluding that the only gloomy Prince William (Rufus Kampa) all you need to do is go out and shoot a deer, which is certainly one way to cope.

Lesley Manville gives a lovely performance as Princess Margaret, permanently smoking in navy blue sequins as she glares at Camilla (Olivia Williams), who is depicted as little more than a fat hurrah who giggles when she goes ‘about t*t’ in front of her of photographers.

All very funny, but the constant caricature of the Queen (Imelda Staunton) as an unfeeling mother who cannot cry seems not only one-dimensional, but also cruel and unfair.

Only Prince Charles (Dominic West, excellent) gets a sensitive hinterland; after Diana’s death we see him capsized with remorse and imbued with a sudden emotional intelligence previously unnoticed in the great cufflink violinist.

‘Sweetheart, mommy? Love?’ he bellows at one point, as the queen ignores him and fusses over a corgi instead.

Only Diana’s ghost – not as crazy as it sounds – has its size. In a strangely moving scene, Charles expresses regret to her about, well, everything.

“That will pass,” she tells him. “No, it won’t,” he answers.

Well, we all know who was right about that.