Sophia Money-Coutts Let me offer some tips for the Sussexes on the correct behaviour for a reality television show
Having featured in a documentary, I’m keen that Harry and Meghan don’t mess up
Look, I’m excited about the forthcoming Netflix series At Home with the Sussexes. What will the best bit be? Meghan in a gingham pinny, collecting eggs from the henhouse that we glimpsed during the Oprah interview? Harry meditating? A big smackeroo at the side of the polo pitch?
The streaming platform has supposedly paid the couple $100 million for the show (and other content), rumoured to airing later this year, and last week one source told an American newspaper: “It’s fair to say that Netflix is getting its pound of flesh.”
But as I’m worried that the Sussexes may not fully understand that reference, I thought it only fair that I offer a few tips to them as a former star of reality television myself. Some of you may remember Posh People, the three-part documentary that aired on BBC Two in 2014.
“Pointless documentary about a vanishing breed,” thunders the show’s single review on the website IMDB.
Still, I think my mother enjoyed it. And I mostly enjoyed making it, apart from a few hiccups that I will discuss below in the hope that Harry and Meghan can avoid them.
First, you two, remember to turn your mic off when you go to the bathroom. Every morning for the six months the Tatler documentary took to make, I was mic’ed up by Martin, the long-suffering sound guy. This often resembled a circus act, because I was wearing something without a waistband (a dress, for instance), and the process involved dangling the wire down my cleavage like a fishing line and running it around my back before Martin managed to find a spot on which to clip the battery pack. After all that excitement, I would then nip to the loo and forget to turn the thing off, only to come out and find Martin cowering in a corner of the Vogue House office as if we’d just been shelled. Poor man.
Check your teeth before every scene. Don’t chew gum on camera, and on no account let them film you bicycling anywhere, because there’s one scene in which I’m pedalling to work past the Albert Memorial and I look like a furious child who’s recently had her stabilisers taken away. In other clips, I appear to have been going through a pearls phase – pearl necklace, pearl earrings – and presumably thought I was being ironic, but the overall effect is middle-aged county campanologist, chewing gum.
Above all, take care not to reveal anything too personal that will live on screen forever. Towards the end of filming, I flew to Scotland to cover what the tartan toffs thought of the forthcoming independence referendum. Based at
Gleneagles (Kyiv, this was not), I motored from castle to castle, chatting to various dukes and clan leaders, only to return to the hotel one evening to discover my ex-boyfriend had flown up to surprise me, and try to win me back. Barnaby, the director, was delighted by this personal storyline; I was more confused, and broke down in tears the following morning as we pulled away from Mohammed Fayed’s castle. “Can you turn the camera off?” I wailed, and
Barnaby nodded, although he later admitted it wasn’t off. Fortunately, none of that miserable footage made the final cut, and I’m sure that you, Meghan and Harry, will have a tighter grip on things, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
There’s another jolly clever writer who once wrote that humankind cannot bear very much reality. Give us eggs and an interiors tour of the yoga studio, but I’m not sure that hysterics immortalised are ever a good idea.