Dear, oh dear, as King Charles himself has said.
The actor who plays the newly minted monarch on The Crown's upcoming season 5, Dominic West, has just confirmed that a storyline Charles and his wife Camilla will have been dreading will in fact be featured in the series: the so-called Camillagate.
The 1993 scandal consisted of a years-old phone call between Camilla and Charles, which was clandestinely recorded and leaked, in which the then-Prince suggested he might be reincarnated as a Tampax so that he could "live inside [Camilla's] trousers."
The phone call shocked the public not just because of its explicit content, but also because it had been recorded while Charles was still married to the late Princess Diana.
Of course, this story constitutes a key moment in the Royal Family's recent history, and The Crown would need to cover it in order to stay consistent to its premise as a dramatised rendering of royals-related events.
"I remember thinking it was something so sordid and deeply, deeply embarrassing [at the time]," West told Entertainment Weekly of the phone call.
"Looking back on it, and having to play it, what you're conscious of is that the blame was not with these two people, two lovers, who were having a private conversation.
"What's really [clear now] is how invasive and disgusting was the press's attention to it, that they printed it out verbatim and you could call a number and listen to the actual tape. I think it made me extremely sympathetic towards the two of them and what they'd gone through."
Charles famously admitted to having carried on an affair with Camilla during his first marriage. The two had been romantically linked before Charles married Diana, and were married in 2005. Camilla, of course, became her husband's Queen Consort when Queen Elizabeth II sadly passed away in September.
Various members of the Royal Family have criticised The Crown over its years on the small screen, but Camilla herself showed her sense of humour when she invited the actress who played her on the Netflix series, Emerald Fennell, to an event at Clarence House in March 2022.
