Fans of The Crown will no doubt know that there are less than 24 hours to go before season five drops on Netflix. But ahead of the highly-anticipated release, there's been one event in particular that has sparked interest…
Is there anything worse than someone getting their hands on the sexts you meant one person, and one person, only to see? We don't think so. Unless, of course, you're the future King of England, and rather than a text, an entire phone call gets leaked to the entire world.
That's exactly what happened back in 1993 when a transcript from a phone call between the then-Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles was leaked to the press and sparked what is now known as ‘tampongate’.
During the six-minute call (a transcript of which was printed in People), the pair – who were both married to other people at the time – discussed being intimate with each other, though undoubtedly the most notable comments came from Charles, who talked of being reincarnated as, erm, Camilla's tampon.
“Oh, God. I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!” Charles can be heard telling Camilla, to which she responds, “What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers?”
It's almost here!
“Or, God forbid, a Tampax. Just my luck!” the future king says, before the pair go on to discuss how it might be better to be a “box of Tampax,” so that Charles wouldn't end up just being “chucked down the lavatory.”
Well, each to their own, we guess?
Of course, at the time, it was a huge scandal and all anyone could talk about, but since then, the couple has married and gone on to become the King of England and the Queen Consort – leaving, we imagine they had hoped, the embarrassing leak (excuse the pun) in the past.
However, season five of The Crown, will play out the events of ‘tampongate’ once more, as the controversial show includes a scene in which Princess Anne (played by Claudia Harrison) talks to Dominic West’s Prince Charles about the recording. She tells him “no one deserves” the humiliation he’s going through and says that when she got over the “gynaecological” aspect of the transcript, she saw “two teenagers of a certain age being so gloriously human and entirely in love.”
And Harrison recently admitted in an interview that she believes the public will be “surprised by” the truth of the recording. Speaking to The Independent, the actor said: “The truth of that recording, I think the British public will be surprised by because at the time it was portrayed as a thing that it wasn’t.”
“And the even-handedness of The Crown is to examine it, and show the sense of humour, The Goon Show connection Charles had with Camilla. It was a great scene to play,” she added.
The Goon Show refers to the nicknames that Charles and Camilla have for each other, Fred and Gladys, after characters in the Fifties radio comedy by the same name.
And how they matched up to the real thing.
Harrison explained: “[Tampongate] happened in the distant past, I was a teenager when that came out and it was spun in a certain way.”
And she isn't the first actor from the show to have discussed the controversial scenes around the events. Josh O'Connor, who played Charles for seasons three and four, previously told SirusXM’s EW Live that it had come up before he even accepted the role: “When they offered me the role, one of my first questions was — I say questions, I think it was pretty much a statement — 'We are not doing the tampon phone call'.”
"I remember thinking it was something so sordid and deeply, deeply embarrassing [at the time]," Dominic West – who has taken on the role of Charles – told Entertainment Weekly of the scandal.
Well, we don't have long to wait to see how events play out for ourselves, though we can't imagine ever feeling anything other than icked-out if any of our lovers told us they'd like to be our tampon. It would be much more environmentally friendly (and therefore attractive) to be reincarnated as a Moon Cup anyway…
The Crown season five is out on Netflix on Wednesday 9 November.
She famously died in a car crash in Paris at age 36.
