Corrections to the blogosphere, the consensus, and the world

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Republic now

The King's Speech was a great two-hander, but even from Wikipedia one can see that it's not particularly close to the facts. The intervention took place many years earlier than in the movie; "Professor Cathy Schultz, for example, points out that, for dramatic reasons, the film-makers tightened the chronology of the events shown, so that they appeared to take place over just a few years. The Duke of York, in fact, began to work with Lionel Logue in October 1926, ten years before the abdication crisis."
The timing also affects the coronation scene, where George confronts Lionel with his lack of qualifications; before 1926 there were no speech path courses or degrees, and nobody could have had them.

Hitchens also complains in Slate that The King's Speech got the politics wrong; Churchill backed Edward, not George, in the succession, and George backed Chamberlain, not Churchill.

The main objection to the thing, though, is that it's a piece of pro-royal propaganda; the inaccuracies all feed that line.

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