This pointless film told us nothing new about Diana
Diana: In Her Own Words (Channel 4, Sunday) was a foolish title for a foolish documentary. A lot has been made of its “exclusive footage” in which she talked openly to her speech coach, Peter Settelen, a former actor who had once played the dastardly Mr Wickham in a 1980 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. But to any royal obsessive, and many exist, there was nothing said by Diana, Princess of Wales to camera that hadn’t already appeared in print.
So, stretched interminably over 90 minutes, director Kevin Sim fleshed out this well-worn story with historical juxtapositions that, much of the time, made spurious claims. In 1981, we were told, Britain’s morale was lifted by the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. Apparently, or so the implication went, those rioters in Brixton, in Handsworth, in Toxteth, put down their weapons and snuggled up to coo at David Emanuel’s hyperbolic wedding dress. Luckily we were spared a soundtrack that segued from The Specials’ Ghost Town into Endless Love by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross.
Estimable actor Iain Glen struggled manfully with the self-satirising narration – this on the advent of Aids: “It is the mid 1980s and a kind of darkness has fallen on the green and pleasant land.” Elsewhere, clichés were mangled beyond any possible meaning: “When fate came calling for Diana, James [former admirer James Colthurst] was in the front row.”
Sometimes, the tone was heavy with irony, as if to point out ( just in case we didn’t get it), that the wedding was no fairy tale. “Like all golden coaches, like Cinderella’s coach, this one was built to astonish and bewitch: only this time it was for real kings and queens.” A timeline showing the Prince and Princess’s lives up to the point when they first met was shown to no discernible effect: we were told that in 1969, when Diana was eight years old, the Prince was about to be invested at Caernarvon Castle.
The archive footage was actually rather affecting. Who could not experience a Proustian rush on hearing Earl Spencer’s affirmation, like some British movie star from the Forties, that he was “terribleh heppeh”? Or admire the goat-like tenacity of ITN’S Carol Barnes as she chased the Princess on the way home to the Earls Court flat where she was happiest? The crowds who gathered around Buckingham Palace on July 29 looked incredibly old-fashioned, almost like the flag-wavers at V-E Day, and then I had the sobering thought that 1981 is as close to the end of the Second World War as it is to today.
But generally this was unremarkable stuff, cobbling together the usual tabloid headlines and clips of the Princess looking miserable. Those who spoke “candidly” seemed a pretty ropey lot and, in desperation, they were introduced with thumbnail biographies that emphasised their place in the social hierarchy. Colthurst was “an old Etonian, doctor, minor aristocrat”; former private secretary Patrick Jephson was “Cambridge, the Royal Navy”. Another interviewee, English National Ballet’s Anne Allan, who had given Diana private dancing lessons, seemed in thrall to the idea of the people’s princess. “She had dance in her soul,” sighed Allan, as if she were witnessing Anna Pavlova’s debut with the Ballets Russes.
Actually, I think the director had dance in his soul, too, or why else would he devote three minutes to a reconstruction of The Dying Swan (the last ballet Diana ever saw)? Was he proud to emphasise a none-too subtle metaphor? Or was it something to do with the documentary’s over-generous running time?
And so to the clips themselves, recorded in 1992, at the height of the Royal “annus horribilis”. It was notable to see how different the Princess looked from the Panorama documentary recorded three years later. Here, she still had something of the giddy Sloane about her with a few sweeping theatrical gestures, imploring eye-movements and ripples of light laughter. Certainly it was interesting to see this transitional Diana, before the shattering effect of her divorce turned her into a pouting, eye-rolling spectre. The odd comment was also new to me, such as the fact that the Prince had wanted to have a mistress in order to keep up with the other Princes of Wales in royal history.
But apart from that, it was impossible to decipher any emotional truth from a public figure who always seemed to be playing to the cameras – even when she wasn’t.
Diana: In Her Own Words