How to turn Diana’s death into a shovel-load of maudlin sludge
DIANA And I (BBC2) must have seemed like a good idea on paper. In the style of a Richard Curtis movie such as Love Actually, it took four stories and interwove them around the events following the death of the Princess of Wales, 20 years ago.
But we love the frothy Curtis films because they are so light and irreverent. This 90-minute one-off drama was a weighty shovel-load of maudlin sludge, heavy with its own significance.
As if the national paroxysm of mourning in the days after Diana’s death was not dramatic enough, this fragmented ensemble piece also preached about arranged Muslim marriages and the agonies of coming out as gay in the Nineties.
With so much piety and liberal angst to be crammed in, the characters had no time to develop naturally. They announced themselves with awkward lines that were more like captions.
One man answered the doorbell to a young woman and cried: ‘Yasmin! Goodness me, Yasmin’s here, my niece, my sister’s girl!’ — just to make quite certain he, she and all the viewers knew her name and their family relationship.
Another introduced her boyfriend Gordon to her mum with the words: ‘ Mother, I’ve only just divorced. Gordon and I went to primary school together.’
That was actress Tamsin Greig, bringing everyone up to date. She played a sour florist with an all-purpose Scottish accent, who drove from Glasgow to Kensington with a lorryload of cut flowers to sell to the grieving tourists.
Nobody wanted her blooms, which suggested either she was a very bad saleswoman or this was a very improbable story. Or both.
Equally unlikely was the tale of the gay 19-year-old, who after his mum died from cancer cheered up when he discovered that the hunky decorator next door, wearing his dungarees like a Chippendale stripper, knew how to make paper flowers.
Oddest of all was the reporter on his honeymoon in Paris, who was apparently married to a woman from 2017. She wasn’t even faintly surprised to learn of Diana’s death: from her perspective, the story was all about William and Harry, just as we see it now, 20 years on.
She should have told her hubby that Charles was going to marry Camilla. What a scoop that would have been in 1997.
For sheer improbability, though, nothing could beat the arts documentary Imagine . . Alma Deutscher: Finding Cinderella ( BBC1), which followed the child prodigy composer as she rehearsed her new opera Cinderella for its debut in Vienna. The work is lushly classical and bursting with melodies, somewhere between the vividness of Mozart and the melodrama of Verdi.
What’s so hard to believe about that? When this film was made, Alma was only 11, and had been writing her opera since she was eight. Now 12 and living with her parents in Kent, Alma played the piano at two, the violin at three and could read music before she knew her alphabet.
The camera watched her transcribing the music in her head: she seemed to be dancing, and daydreaming, and laughing at a private joke, all at the same time.
Alan Yentob, so pleased with himself that he’s perpetually in danger of disappearing in a puff of smugness, interviewed Alma, and asked her to perform her party piece. He selected four notes at random, and she improvised a tune around them.
In seconds, she invented a folk dance melody that sounded 200 years old. But it’s cheap to present Alma a mere oddity. She is a true prodigy, a phenomenon.