The sudden death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car crash in a Paris tunnel, and the ensuing public outpouring of emotion seem, in hindsight, to be so strange as to be almost surreal. This documentary (24 July), marked 20 years since Diana’s death, and brought many memories back. We saw the royal wedding of 1981 and the royal funeral of 1997 – and between those two events much footage of the princess with her young sons; laughing on a water-slide, cuddling children in a nursery, looking beautiful, looking sad, talking to people in the crowds, visiting the sick.
It was moving to see her adult sons talk so articulately of their grief– yet the programme was so hagiographical as to leave one with little impression of what kind of a person Diana really was.