The Other Prince William
CHANNEL 4, 9.00PM
This poignant Secret History documentary retraces the forgotten story of another tragic royal – Prince William of Gloucester. First cousin of the Queen and, at one time, fourth in line to the throne, he seemed to have it all. Director Brian Henry Martin deftly outlines how this strikingly handsome, fiercely intelligent young man who had been a page boy at the 1953 Coronation, soon found himself at odds with the Royal family. This was because of his playboy lifestyle and a romance that had echoes of Princess Margaret’s doomed love for Peter Townsend and, worse, the romantic obsession that led to his uncle Edward VIII’s abdication.
Here for the first time on camera William’s lover, the twice divorced Hungarian former model Zsuzsi Starkloff, now 79, speaks of their meeting in swinging Sixties Tokyo when he took up a post with the Foreign Office, and the fairytale romance that ensued. A slate of royal biographers are on hand to opine on why some senior members of the Royal family saw the liaison as a threat and set about disrupting it – although fate intervened