swanpride

Didn't he say it in the end? Though I guess the "your favourite child" had a questionmark behind it.... But to me it is obvious that it is Andrew. It was always Andrew.

An actual hunter usually eats what he kills. Hence I don't necessarily mind hunting game, but I do mind fox hunting (which they keep glossing over I noticed). It is for sure a better way to get to your meat than what we do to pigs. Thus said, I am not sure if that particular stag would still be tasty. You need to kill your game with one quick shot, otherwise the sweat and the fear basically ruins the meat. But I am not sure if being already wounded before the kill shot has a similar effect.

Maybe dinner time wasn't even listed, so they had no idea how much time there was between drinks and dinner.

Naturally it doesn't, but there are certain things society has decided to code as "feminine" and others which have been coded as "masculine". And it is kind of gross that a lot of "feminine" things are actually pretty good approaches to conflict. In reality there are naturally women who act very "masculine" (see Thatcher) and men who have no problem with embracing a supposedly "feminine" approach.

Oh, that's true. Well, that he was a businessman, but she naturally denied that it coloured her decision. I went into a little bit more detail regarding Marc Thatcher in the gossip discussion. I think a lot of the perception of Thatcher has changed with hindsight, though.

Naturally it does, but a lot of those historical events could have added to the characters. Granted, they can cover Ireland in more detail next season, that's after all when the situation heats up even more historically speaking, and granted, they can't feature every single president, but I really do think that skipping over the end of the cold war is an extremely odd choice. Especially, as I pointed out above, it could have served as a better book mark for the season than the one they had. 1990 was technically a year of hope for a lot of people….the cold war was over, the occupation of Germany ended, a lot of countries gained independence from the Soviet Union, Thatcher was forced out of office (which DID gave hope to a lot of people), Apartheid ended, the Hubbel space telescope was launched, the first web server for the world wide net was created, it was very much a year of optimism, even though the golf crisis was already looming at this point. And I really would have loved to see a take on what the Queen might have thought about all this. I mean, she experienced WWII and the whole Cold War, I can't imagine that this year meant less to her than to anyone else who did, too.

To add to the moments the hosts were dickish: Laughing about Thatcher when she asked what the excitement was about and getting the side where they sighted the stag wrong. The fact aside that Thatcher is obviously not a hunter (and they themselves are obviously having hang ups about "lower Borns" hunting "for sport" instead of "ecological balance (yeah, right, tell that the Foxes)), how the hell is she supposed to know the area well enough to realise where the stag could have been and where not? It's extremely rude to leave her out of the loop in the first place, but even ruder to laugh about her actually asking about the situation. Thatcher's distain was still in its own way snobbish, especially her sneering about the games, and about Germans and Scotts.

Thing is that even if you go by what is in the show and not by historic realities, Charles and Diana is the only semi-arranged marriage we get to see. All the others are suggested to be love matches and yet all of them fail too. Which makes one wonder if this is less a question of arranged or not and more a question of the maturity of the people involved. And, in the case of the queen, how willing they are to overlook the partner cheating on them. Or, in other words, the metatext isn't necessarily supporting the text of the show.

Though historically, Margaret simply lost interest in her first choice, and Edward VIII got his first choice and him abdicating was actually a good thing for the country. Which leaves Charles and Camilla. And I don't think that Charles being blocked from marrying Camilla excuses in any way him marrying Diana. It's not like he didn't have other options at all, but he went and picked a half-child, believing that he could mould to what he needed with no regard if they even shared the same interests.

Sex with underage girls conducted by older men was morally questionable, and that's what the queen is bothered about, him being so blithely talking about it, even if it was just in the context of a movie.

There are a few more details which point to her being manipulative through the season like But I guess they want to leave it to the audience to make a judgement about Diana. Not that I think that the show will change anyone's mind about her.

A detail I liked about the last episode was Diana standing there all dressed up instead of being part of the "walk through the woods" crowd, set apart in a setting in which she supposedly fit in perfectly originally.

Oh, the costs were certainly an issue. But in the end, I think it is mostly Argentina who is to blame there, and maybe the US. They were a NATO partner after all, but they refused to do what they are supposed to do, defend an ally, despite their ships being way closer.

True, but she could have told her in the car. Not that I disagree about the reverse snobbish attitude, I pointed out the same. But is was very much a two-sided thing.

Well, as someone who has only a passing knowledge about it, why did the situation escalate around that time? Also, weren't there more attacks following this one on British soil? I desperately tried to piece together what I know about it, and I fell short. I think I would have rather a discussion about politics than one about about Phillip's weird hang-up. Honestly, I enjoyed the character way more back when he made snarky remarks about political events.

Oh, I wondered the same thing, but at the same time, it was kind of dickish to point out how ill-fitting the blue dress for hunting was after they were already on the hill, instead of pointing out immediately that the dress is not ideal. And how the hell is Thatcher supposed to know that "nobody sits on this chair"? Plus, it might just be me, but if I expect a guest who visits me for the first time, I would make sure that someone is there to greet said guest and show her the ropes.

Frankly, I don't think that I needed the Fuck off 2020, because Corona aside, most of the BS we dealt with this year was still the fall out of 2016, and I am kind of glad that a lot of the trends set back then are now slowly starting to get reversed. Fuck off Covid might be more fitting. This is the first time in ages that I actually felt something for a republican politician. This guy who was responsible for the voting, he really looked distraught. I can relate. I am now wondering if the 2020 Bingo card is an actual Bingo card. And why the hell we never got the Eratica on the wall, like promised. Man, I can't imagine the next months without this show, especially since the US now goes now in the "hot phase" and we will really need shows like this to call out the right people.

Wait...you have (or had at some point) a tax for VOTING????? Man, every time I think I have understood how questionable the system is, something else crops up. I think it was multiple things which brought Thatcher down. There were the scandals around her son, the way she treated other party members, the Chequers scandal and I guess that she just suffered a very public defeat on an international stage didn't help either, because it showed her to be vulnerable. Things just boiled up.

Honestly, I always felt that this portrayal of Camilla was kind of unfair. Nothing about the situation was in any way okay, but if Camilla was trapped in an unhappy marriage of her own, it's understandable that she wouldn't give up on Charles, especially if real feelings were involved. Plus, HE could have ended it all along, and he obviously didn't do it. Maybe the show is right and he was also in love with his own fantasy, but in his case, it was romeo and Juliet and not Cinderella. I guess Diana was mostly picked because she was as someone put it once "the last virgin left".

Mmm...I noticed that too, they went from having years mentioned to vague "four month earlier/later" and similar. Not sure what the point is, especially since we are now getting in territory a lot of viewers might still remember.

Not really regarding the royals but because it is basically Gossip I'll put it here: The whole "lost son at a rally" thing didn't have much of a suspense to me because I remembered that in the Thatcher movie, it is mentioned that her son is living in South-Africa (while the daughter is still there to take care of it). The relationship with her daughter is shown to be pretty much like in the TV show, but the implication regarding the son is more than he doesn't care about her because she was away too often while her children were young. But after looking up Marc Thatcher, I am more inclined to believe the "self-entitled brat" version of the story. This guy...wow. Used the advantage of his mother's name at every opportunity, lot's of questionable dealing in South Africa while she was still in office (and she was accused of making decisions to favour his business multiple times) and as if that isn't enough already, he was also convicted and given a four-year suspended prison sentence and a fine in South Africa for funding the 2004 Equatorial Guinea coup d'état attempt. He is banned from entering the US, banned from living in multiple countries including Switzerland, and a lot of people feel that he should get stripped of the titles he inherited from his parents. Yeah, I can completely see the notion that this guy got indulged too much as a child. And the ralley...talk about being stupid. Not enough experience, driving the wrong car and barely able to admit that it was his fault.

Let's say that he used her to influence EC politics quite heavily, but that didn't stop him from touching Granada. Though I guess they had their misguided economic ideas in common.

I am mostly wondering how the show gets the idea that she is constantly in the way of other people's love when she herself very much picked Phillip despite him being an unpopular and problematic choice.

Oh, just the transition from the EG to the EU, the peace movement in reaction to more missiles being stationed on European soil, the invasion of Grenada by the US, the beginning of the single market (of which Thatcher was one of the architects for the better or the worse), the fall of the Berlin wall which lead to the end of the cold war and the four point agreement (which ended the British occupation of Germany) and which also lead to the Chequers Affair, And those are just the main events I can come up with which were directly related to Britain.

The tabloids do this "pitting females against each other" all the time...first it was Diana vs Anne, with the former naturally being the "beautiful" one. Than it was Diana vs Sarah, with Sarah being sold as the more down to earth one. Then the tables turned and Sarah basically became the "Duchess of Pork" while Diana was turned into some sort of angle, and then it was naturally Diana vs Camilla. Frankly, I have no idea how the tabloids survived the time between Diana dying and William getting married. Well, I guess they had their "William vs Harry" angle, (with William being the responsible and Harry being the irresponsible one), but they clearly prefer to pit females against each other. Happened again with Cate and Megan, though in this case there was a hefty dose of racism in it.