Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1260764
History did me an enormous favour by having Her Majesty begin her reign a year or so before I was born. When the director and producer Stephen Daldry and Suzanne Mackie asked me to design The Crown, I could do something I'd never done before—use layers of memory and experience to enrich the research. The story of The Crown was, however, to begin earlier still, with the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Philip Mountbatten in 1947. This was a time when the country was on its knees, recovering from a world war. Bombs had decimated London, they had even hit parts of Buckingham Palace and Downing Street. Worryingly, it became clear that my colour A T h e U n w r i t t e n L a w o f T w o - T h i r d s D E S I G N I N G T H E C R O W N B Y M A R T I N C H I L D S , P R O D U C T I O N D E S I G N E R palette could be nothing but shades of umber, earth tones, with peeling walls, stains, disintegration, all adding up to the opposite of what an audience might expect of a drama about the British Royal Family. I figured the best thing to do would be to emphasize the decay and smithereens, to set them against the red, white and gilt of a royal palace. With this contrast, the audience couldn't fail to notice both. And if the show was well received, then we'd be in for another half-century or more of cultural change. In future seasons, we could move on from postwar austerity through recovery, gain colour in the 1960s and beyond… And in future seasons, so we did. But thinking this way in 2014, I was in danger of getting ahead of myself, so I froze