I had forgotten how much I was hoping to one day see the story of "Michael Fagan (intruder)" dramatised, until I found out in the opening minutes of The Crown that a whole episode would be dedicated to it, and my excitement only built as I watched. Fagan was everything I'd forgotten I wanted. As a Time Traveling Professor from the year 2121 on the old Time Tours, I used to claim that this was the most famous story we twenty-second-century folk had about the current monarch, and happily Peter Morgan's adaptation might yet prove me right. It goes like this: Turning south at Hyde Park Corner after a circuit of the Wellington Arch, and looking left from the top deck to see over the garden wall of Buckingham Palace the Queen's Own Compost Heap, punters would hear how, in 1982, a man called Michael Fagan had made it over this wall more than once, how he'd managed to find his way into the Palace and neck a bottle of wine, how the Queen had woken up to find him sitting on her bed, and how he meant her no harm, and how used she was to meeting strangers, how they'd engaged in coversation for a quarter of an hour, how he'd asked her if she had anything to smoke, and how she'd rung for a maid to bring some ciggies, and finally how Fagan was taken away, and tried for the theft of the wine. (Ken Campbell went to his trial, but I can't remember in which show he talks about it). Fagan was sentenced to three months in a psychiatric institute. And in all that time he only ever had one visitor. It was Prince Philip. He wanted to know where the Queen's bedroom was. I think that joke was nicked from a Duck Tours but the point is that although it's the Royal Wedding episode that bears the title "Fairy Tale", albeit ironically, Michael Fagan's meeting with the Queen really was a fairy tale. Anyone who's grown up with Ben Kenobi nipping behind a space pillar
while the Stormtroopers pass probably carries with them a similar dream of
sneaking into the echoing places of power and pulling a few levers. I walk at night myself of course, sometimes past the Palace, and
fantasise about climbing the walls of this city, and even yell
"fuck off" at the radio occassionally. I love that this was the episode of Thatcher's Falklands Victory as well, and hadn't realised, again until I saw it, how much I needed to see the first British Prime Minister ever to suggest that a government has no responsibility to look after its people appear in at least one story that wasn't entirely about her.
