Sold to 70 countries, the global soap Oprah

HARRY and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey will be broadcast in more than 70 countries in deals experts say will be worth ‘a king’s ransom’.

Sources close to the couple yesterday said the interview will go out in America on Sunday night as planned, despite calls for it to be postponed while the Duke of Edinburgh is seriously ill in hospital.

US television network CBS announced that it is syndicating the two-hour special to dozens of countries.

Countries that will screen the show include Britain, Australia, Canada, about 40 nations in sub-Saharan Africa and even Iceland.

More countries will be announced in the coming days under arrangements that experts say could earn tens of millions of pounds for CBS. The Duke and Duchess of

Sussex are not being paid for the interview and will not receive a slice of the syndication profits, the production company, owned by Oprah, said.

CBS is said to be charging advertisers £150,000 for a 30-second slot – meaning they could rake in millions over the course of the broadcast alone.

PR insider Mark Borkowski said: ‘With 70 countries, a conservative estimate is that this is going to make tens of millions. I can’t see anything less than that.

‘You’re looking at a king’s ransom and it’s going to be a massive payday for CBS. The last event on a scale like this was probably Meghan’s own wedding.

‘If it had been outside of Covid and the ravages of that on the ad industry it might have been a bigger deal, but it’s still going to be a huge piece of content to have.’

The scale of the sale means that hundreds of millions of people around the world could see the interview, the kind of audience associated with events such as the Olympics. It will first be seen on CBS on Sunday night. In Britain, ITV is said to have paid £1million to show the interview here on Monday night.

A source close to the couple said the timing of the broadcast was now out of their hands. The source said: ‘There are a lot of people who are going to talk about this until the programme airs, but the programming and all the rest of it is ultimately up to CBS. We’re not involved in that side of things.

‘As it stands, I don’t think there is any intention from the programme maker to change its air date.’

Tory MP Bob Blackman said the interview was simply ‘inappropriate’.

He added: ‘To be doing a tell-all interview screened in the UK when Philip is in hospital…they are badly advised, to put it mildly.

‘None of these royal interviews have gone well…and I can’t see this going any better.’