Diana, Princess of Wales, was a hugger. She loved to embrace people, especially her young boys, William and Harry. We knew this already, but last night’s documentary – Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy – showed just how close she held them.
“She smothered us with love, that’s for sure,” said Harry, the more open and expansive of the two brothers. “She would just engulf you and squeeze you as tight as possible . . . There was no escape, you were there, and you were there as long as she wanted to hold you.”
The intensity of the connection between mother and sons sounded almost frightening, and the force of it clearly remains an animating principle in the lives of the adult William and Harry.
Twenty years after her untimely death, Diana’s presence is still real to them, and they continue to support Aids patients and land-mine survivors in her name. But although the 90-minute film was a deeply-felt tribute from her sons, who shared “the most intimate memories of her for the first time”, alongside previously unheard contributions and anecdotes from several of Diana’s friends, the woman herself remained as elusive as ever.
It was intended as 'a film that in years to come, the princes could show their children'
In part, this was due to knowing too much about the heavily-trailed content of the documentary in advance. Diana’s habit of sending rude birthday cards; the impromptu supermodel tea party – Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington – she gathered to impress the 12-year-old William; even the princes’ painful regret that the last phone call they had with their mother was so short – all this had previously been revealed, robbing the moments of any semblance of genuine intimacy or revelation.
But the absence of Diana was also attributable to the very nature of the project itself. Producer Nicolas Kent said that it was intended as “a film that in years to come, the princes could show their children”.
So this was never going to be an authentic portrait of the flawed, charismatic, child-like woman who held the world enthralled, and whose passing inspired such extraordinary public grief.
The worst that could be said of her was that she had a habit of dressing William and Harry in terrible matching outfits
Instead we were presented with a relentlessly idealised image of Diana, forever splashing about on water-slides and stuffing sweets in her sons’ pockets, urging them to be as naughty as they could get away with. The worst that could be said of her was that she had a habit of dressing William and Harry in terrible matching outfits.
Such mythologising is understandable in sons who have lost a beloved mother far too young. But it does not make for compelling television, especially when constantly accompanied by a tinkly piano soundtrack and a reverently murmuring voiceover by narrator Amanda Redman. The effect was often saccharine, even though the princes’ emotional memories were, by their own admission, still very raw.
William, up until then guarded and slightly aloof, suddenly came alive when he described the impact of a loved one's death
The strongest part of the documentary was the final third, when William and Harry spoke about their personal sense of grief and loss, rather than their recollections of Diana. William, up until then guarded and slightly aloof, suddenly came alive when he described the impact of a loved one’s death: “You don’t quite know who you are, what you’re doing, or what’s going on.” There, we saw a flash of the soul-baring his mother was so famous for.
In a film striking for its absences, the most curious omission was that of the princes’ father, Charles. At no point did they refer to the nature of their relationship with him, or his marriage to their mother. It was as if he had been excised from the story.
But in this loving hagiography, so loyally one-sided, Diana wasn’t really there either.
Verdict? Three stars out of five.
