A perfectly handy primer for the couple of the year
By the end of this month, only republicans will not count themselves Harry and Meghan experts. Someone could set a national pub quiz and we’d all get full marks. What do/did her/his parents do for a living? Which detergent advert did she complain about to the head of Proctor & Gamble aged 12? Precisely how fast did he sprint from the camera to his helicopter when an alert sounded during that TV interview in Camp Bastion?
Prince Harry has always had the look of someone who wants to sprint away from cameras, but he’s getting hitched to someone who doesn’t. Their different attitudes to the lens was a thread running through and Meghan: A Love Story (Sky One).
This was far from the only documentary about the shortly-to-be-newly-weds, but it was a perfectly handy primer. It had answers to all of the above. An array of talking heads – old teachers, former colleagues – suggested that some effort had been made to explore Meghan Markle’s blameless youth. Not everyone could be counted on to shed much light. “Oh my gosh,” gushed the director of the Californian soup kitchen where Meghan worked. “Someone I know is royalty!”
Lacking direct access to the subjects, these programmes fall somewhere between psychology and gossip, the two indispensable skills of the royal watcher. Thus Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton shared the wealth of his fathoms-deep researches into Meghan. Rhiannon Mills of Sky attached great significance to an interview with Harry in which he talked about wanting children. As ever, royal observer Penny Junor seemed to know far more than she could say.
A shortage of space enforced some omissions. Harry’s unfortunate party regalia wasn’t mentioned in dispatches. Anyone needing to bone up on Meghan’s character in Suits should look elsewhere. Also there was nowt about camping under the stars in Botswana. At the end their various chums were invited to face the camera and wish them well. This is just a hunch but the happy couple might not watch it, seeing as they already know all the answers.
Hugh Fearnley-whittingstall loves collaring a minister. Saving Africa’s Elephants: Hugh and the Ivory War memorably climaxed with him ambushing Andrea Leadsom, then the relevant minister. Jeremy Hunt must have seen that toe-curling footage and issued a code-red memo to all underlings at the Department of Health: on no account let that speccy irritant into my personal space.
In the concluding episode of
Britain’s Fat Fight (BBC One), the hunt for Hunt intensified. Fearnleywhittingstall even managed to steal up on him at the Conservative Party conference, causing the minister to back away as if from a suddenly detonated stink bomb. That was the closest the quarry came to capture, resulting in a slightly bathetic conclusion to this righteous campaign to confront the obesity epidemic.
Hunt’s elusiveness demonstrated the limits of direct action. Fearnleywhittingstall (and Jamie Oliver, who had a cameo) can kick up an almighty fuss, and spearhead a shouty petition, but in the end they will have to rely on the slow, creeping impact of consciousness-raising.
The Fearnley-whittingstall way is to talk good evidence-based horse sense. The ideas proposed both by him and the tiggerish neuroscientist Giles Yeo were simple, sensible and, in many cases, stealthy. A set of scales in GPS’ waiting rooms. Fewer holes in a chippy’s salt shaker.
There was no blaming or fatshaming anyone. Rather than wag a finger (except at the stubborn resistance of the Department of Health), Fearnley-whittingstall favoured the high five, the comforting arm. It worked with Janet, an obese single mother in Newcastle. Her father had just lost a leg to type-2 diabetes and his remaining foot looked gangrenously vulnerable too. Despite this dread warning, she couldn’t shake the weight. Suggesting a little me time, Fearnleywhittingstall took her surfing. The boost to her morale was remarkable, and she promptly dropped several dress sizes.
Not every overweight person can be personally incentivised by a self-help guru from BBC One. But as that ungrammatical slogan has it, every little helps. The programme’s cogent argument is that state needs to do more. As the advertising eminence Sir John Hegarty put it, “The Government is not stepping up to the plate.” The problem is that everyone else is.
Harry and Meghan: A Love Story ★★★
Britain’s Fat Fight ★★★