‘Diana and the Prince of Wales deserve better than muck-raking spite posing as history’
Allison Pearson reviews the Channel 4 documentary
ONE golden rule of television is that any programme which makes extensive use of pan pipes is an absolute stinker. And, boy, was there a bad smell coming off Diana: In Her Own Words.
Channel 4 justified last night’s invasion of the late Princess of Wales’s privacy with the claim that video tapes of her talking to speech coach Peter Settelen offered “an important contribution to the historical record”.
Viewers who turned on for that important contribution will have been surprised to discover that the “historic” tapes added up to no more than 10 minutes of a 90-minute documentary.
Director Kevin Sim was not afraid to pad out his paltry footage with sweeping analogies, news stories, emotive music and a portentous script. Not afraid and not qualified.
The programme began on a bogus note. “Further conversations with Diana from BBC Panorama have been re-voiced by an actress,” it said innocently in the opening credits. Fair enough, you might think, except that the actress sounded uncannily like the Princess and cunning edits meant that you often couldn’t tell which Diana was speaking, the one perched on her pink stripy sofa in Kensington Palace or the one on Panorama.
I don’t suppose the confusion greatly bothered the programme makers because it made them look like they had loads of material. In fact, they were desperately lifting quotes wholesale from Martin Bashir’s 1995 interview. There was so much reheated material here that the programme could have been made in a microwave. Either way, it set the tone for a tacky, highly partisan project, codename: Knife Charles.
The Prince of Wales has made his fair share of mistakes, but, frankly, this was a right royal stitch-up. To take one shameless example, we saw footage of Diana weeping at an airport as her ballet teacher, Anne Allan, said: “She loved Charles but Charles loved another woman. I think it made her very sad, devastated, she wasn’t enough.” It was a poignant juxtaposition and your heart went out to the poor princess. Except, hang on a minute, the weeping at the airport happened when Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles were newly engaged and she was tearfully waving him off, not sobbing over his infidelity with Camilla Parker Bowles. I’m afraid that, if you are claiming to be adding to the historical record, then you don’t dice and splice the order of events to make one protagonist in the drama look worse than he actually was. The documentary encouraged you to believe that Charles had been unfaithful to Diana from the start and had no intention of keeping his marriage vows. But the Princess herself confirmed that the Prince rekindled his affair with Mrs Parker Bowles after five years when the relationship had, as he told Jonathan Dimbleby, “irretrievably broken down”.
Appearing for the Prosecution (there were no witnesses for the Defence) were the ballet teacher, Diana’s former press secretary, Patrick Jephson, and her bodyguard, Ken Wharfe. Jephson, seen walking mournfully through an abandoned AIDS ward (cue more pan pipes), is now firmly in the Saint Diana camp. “I saw royal virtues embodied in her more than in him,” he snarked. Jephson is right to be upset by the “grey men” and their attempt to neutralise the threat Diana posed to the future King, and, latterly, to airbrush her ghost to pave the way for Queen Camilla. Yet, when I interviewed Jephson, back in 1997, he assured me that the Prince of Wales had done as much as any man of his background could possibly have done to comfort and help his distraught and (as we now know) mentally ill young wife. If William and Harry watched
Diana: In Her Own Words – and I sincerely hope that they didn’t – they would have concluded that their dear papa was a cross between Dick Dastardly and Lord Voldemort.
It was their mother who was the star of this show. And what a star!
It’s 20 years since death took her, but Diana’s wattage in these recordings is undimmed. Her natural flirtatiousness – the lowering of those beautiful eyes, the shy sideways glances – is on full beam. Like all the great movie legends, she had the gift of making you want to go on looking and looking. How terribly young she seems, still a kid really. She gossips with her speech coach, spilling the beans about her first date with Charles (“like a bad rash he was all over me, Ugh!”) and their sex life (once every three weeks then a drought without end). She seems more like a girl in the dorm at boarding school, giggling, pulling faces and shrieking, Omigod!, to her chums, than a woman conscious of her rank and position. That instinctive egalitarian spirit, matched with an unappeasable need to be needed – getting the whole world to pay attention to her when her husband wouldn’t – was a kind of lethal magic. It charmed even as it burned.
The saddest moment in the documentary comes when a young prince enters the room and interrupts filming. We can’t see William, but we hear both mother and son crack up with delicious shared mirth. Now she is gone, that tender memory belongs to her children, not to Channel 4. Diana, and the Prince of Wales too, deserve better than this muck-raking spite posing as history. Pan pipes pipe down. Let her rest in peace.
It set the tone for a tacky, partisan project, codename: Knife Charles
Like all the great movie legends, she had the gift of making you want to go on looking and looking