This Prince Charming’s life was no romantic fairy tale
How quickly minor royalty fades from the memory. Prince William of Gloucester – George V’s grandson, nephew of Edward VIII and George VI - may now be largely forgotten; but he was a media darling before his death in a plane crash, aged only 30, in 1972. You could see why, in The Other
Prince William (Channel 4)– a straightforward but moving documentary about his short life and doomed affair with a twice-divorced, Hungarian model, Zsuzui Starkloff.
All the angels were gathered at Prince William’s birth. He didn’t just have money and royal blood. He was lovely-looking with icy blue eyes. And he had that rare thing in royal circles: brains. A diffident, nervy intelligence that came across in an affecting interview clip from the Sixties.
He went to Cambridge and Stanford Universities, and defied royal convention to serve in the Foreign Office in Japan, rather than the Armed Forces. Inevitably, the programme zeroed in on his two-year affair in Japan with Starkloff – the most unsuitable of royal brides. At her own admission, it didn’t help that she was foreign, twice divorced, had a child and was older than him. The Royal family – still reeling 35 years after the Abdication Crisis – remained wary of twice-divorced women. So Prince William brought the affair to an end.
It’s not entirely clear, however, that the Royal family did put the kibosh on the marriage. When Prince William wrote to the Queen, sounding her out about it, she sympathetically wrote back, “Follow your heart.”
So the programme overegged its central thesis – Establishment extinguishes romantic fairytale. And it turned a little trashy at times, not least in the sensationalist voice-over: “He was the playboy prince whose pursuit of the good life made him the idol of the young Prince Charles.”
But Starkloff saved the show. She was a dignified presence, sharing Prince William’s gentle intelligence. You believed she hadn’t been on the make with her Prince Charming. And she clearly still mourned him. It felt cruel to film her watching footage of Prince William’s death at Wolverhampton Airport. But, for all the bad taste, it was impossible not to be stirred by her agony.
There was a different moving moment in Stephen Fry in
Central America (ITV1) – when TV’s Mr Everywhere actually refused some Class A drugs.
We’ve all heard so much about Fry’s cocaine-snorting habits – the coke in gentlemen’s clubs, the coke in Prince Charles’s loo... So it was quite a shock when he turned down some fresh peyote – the hallucinogenic cactus found in the Mexican desert. His reason was well-expressed – “My mind expanding days are over. My mind is starting to shrink as a result of earlier expansion.”
Underneath the familiar eloquence, there lurked a moving melancholy. We all know, too, about Fry’s manic depression. That used to be concealed by a frantic desire to entertain: with ironic gurning and linguistic pirouettes. But now, at 57, he’s dialled down the histrionics. And it’s all for the better. You remember what Fry, for all his ubiquity, is – an intensely intelligent, funny man.
Yes, there were all the tired tricks of the celebrity travelogue. To satisfy the meretricious demands of travel TV, Fry went in an old American schoolbus down the spine of Mexico. He sampled the local fare: a frightening-looking, purple maize pastie which turned out to be – surprise, surprise – “absolutely heavenly”. He did an awkward dance in outsized pointy shoes with local cowboys in an old silver-mining town.
Fry didn’t quite subvert the genre but he was witty and honest within its tired bounds. He was clearly upset by a street protest in Mexico City against the kidnap and presumed murder of 43 students last September. And he refreshingly broke the first commandment of travel telly – Thou Shalt Always Gush About Abroad – by pointing out that Mexico is the fattest country on earth.
Most celebrity travel presenters bring little to exotic destinations, except their famous faces. Fry used that planet-sized brain of his to enlighten and amuse the viewer. I loved his irreverent description of Chihuahua and the Mexican state’s eponymous dog – a cross between a bat and a small, skinless puppy.
Fry’s mind may be starting to shrink but he still expands viewers’ minds. He would have made an excellent foreign correspondent. The Other Prince William Stephen Fry Does Central America