As I’ve mentioned before, I am in the middle of a first watching of The Crown, which is an interesting way to learn history but also a risky way to learn history, given that it takes liberties with known facts. Anyway, I’m almost finished with season 3, and throughout seasons 2 and 3 I’ve found it fascinating (as a person who has never lived in Britain) to note which events I had already heard about… because there’s only one place I would have heard about them, and that’s from previous watchings of 
This five-part series discusses British history from the end of WWII through the time of the series’ release, which was 2007. The series was highly praised, though a couple of inaccuracies had to be withdrawn from re-issues of the book and DVD set, and as an outsider and a person too young to have witnessed any of this in an intelligent way, it’s so interesting to see this particular sweep of history put together and walked through in a way that makes sense.
The overlapping events between this series and The Crown piqued my curiosity because, interestingly, there are so few of them. The Profumo scandal is the big incident they both cover, and Macmillan being openly mocked in a theater is a minor incident in both; also just in the episode of The Crown I began to watch yesterday, a miner’s strike was mentioned, which Marr discusses in detail. Besides that the two series are completely separate, and the way various personalities–especially Prime Ministers–come across in each is certainly food for thought. In The Crown, as a person who doesn’t know anything about anything, I frequently get the impression the show is acknowledging something about the PMs, but I need Andrew Marr to spell those things out for me.
Of course, the two series aren’t necessarily at odds in any way (though they both have their points of view). There are just so many things to cover that neither one can cover them all. Thus, it’s interesting to see which things each one chooses.
Something I find especially interesting about Marr’s series, and which The Crown has failed to get across to me at all, is how Britain has had to hang on by its fingernails since WWII. There were a few, brief periods of economic reprieve, sometimes real and sometimes only in memory, but for the most part Britain has been in a constant state of economic crisis for decades now. The Crown tends to harp on the future of the royal family and whether the British people will continue to pay out for it, but Marr’s narrative–not at all concerned with royalty–covers the loans, the interest, the strikes, the exports, and the social malaise in a way The Crown just doesn’t. The Crown does mention the devaluation of the pound, including a recreation of Wilson’s infamous speech about how it “doesn’t mean the pound in your pocket is worth less at home” or whatever the exact nonsense words were. It also presents a situation in which Princess Margaret charms Gerald Ford into agreeing to another loan. But these situations, in The Crown, are presented as personal situations, overshadowed by the personal relationships between people, not as the crises of a nation.
Anyway. Ping-ponging the two series off each other has certainly been interesting.
Frost and Fog 