Princess Diana documentary is most-watched C4 show in a year
A DOCUMENTARY featuring tapes of the late Diana, Princess of Wales helped Channel 4 score its highest overnight viewing figures in over a year as the programme divided opinion among audiences.
which aired on Sunday night and featured footage of the Princess speaking candidly and informally about her life, was watched by an average audience of 3.5m and a peak of 4.1m, according to overnight ratings which were published yesterday.
But the divisive programme did not manage to beat the series finale of BBC One’s period drama
The final episode of Poldark third series drew in an average of 4.9m viewers, beating the Diana documentary by more than a million.
The use of controversial video tapes in
has already been strongly criticised by Royal watchers, and Rosa Monckton, who was one of Diana’s closest friends, claimed the decision to air the footage was a “betrayal of her privacy”.
But Channel 4 maintained that the programme gave the Princess a voice and placed it “front and centre” in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of her death in a car crash in a road tunnel in Paris on August 31, 1997.
The documentary featured Diana speaking candidly and informally about her upbringing, her courtship with the Prince of Wales, her troubled marriage and her public life. Kensington Palace, the Royal household of Diana’s sons, the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry, has declined to comment on the documentary.
The programme divided opinions of commentators, with reviews ranging from “trashy” to “heartbreaking”. Writing in the
Jan Moir said she thought Diana would have approved of the tapes being aired and that they showed the Princess in a “golden light”.
But Andrew Billen gave the programme two stars out of five in a review in yesterday, and branded the documentary as “pretentious and trashy”.