As Diana would be turning 60, this retelling of her life offered nothing new … apart from perhaps an insight into how bizarrely limited life was for gels like her
There is a moment in Diana, ITV’s feature-length documentary marking what would have been the princess’s 60th birthday, when, after her cousin and boarding school friend Diana McFarlane describes the teenage Diana having pictures of Prince Charles on her bedside table (“a sort of childhood crush really”), the makers cut to contemporaneous footage of the “dashing prince”. He is so definitively undashing that you cannot help but feel a point has, advertently or inadvertently, been made about the limited life view of young gels of Diana’s era and breeding.
That’s about as much insight, deliberate or otherwise, we are given in this offering. And really, why should there be more? We’ve had it all, surely, over the 24 years since she was killed in a car crash in Paris. And before that, during the years when her marriage to Charles was falling apart and they jockeyed for position and control of the narrative in the press, via interviews, leaks, tell-all books, meaningful silences, photo ops and all the messy rest of it.
