When is the new Princess Diana documentary on? airdate
The surprise revelation comes from former BBC Governor and Royal National Theatre boss Richard Eyre in a documentary that also uncovers that the BBC decided against officially telling Buckingham Palace about the controversial interview, and that Diana was “rehearsed” to answer the questions.
The feature length film, Diana: The Interview That Shocked The World tells the story of how a virtually unknown journalist, Martin Bashir, landed the interview of the century in 1995.
But it’s the revelation of the Queen’s attitude to the Panorama interview that will surprise observers since the monarch rarely gives her opinion on issues if at all.
Said Richard Eyre: “I had lunch with the Queen not long after [the interview went out]. She said to me unprompted, ‘How are things at the BBC?’ I said, ‘Fine’. She said, ‘Frightful thing to do. Frightful thing that my daughter-in-law did.”
The BBC chose not to officially inform the BBC about the interview, according to the former BBC Controller of Editorial Policy, Richard Ayre.
He said: “We agreed to Diana’s condition that the documentary must not become known to Buckingham Palace. She thought the Palace would try to stop it. We agreed that the Princess should be the person to tell the Palace.”
Diana did eventually inform the Queen’s Private Secretary.
The BBC also made sure that the then BBC Chairman Marmaduke Hussey was kept out of the loop too by BBC boss John Birt.
Richard Eyre said: “Lord Hussey came up to me at a christmas party. He said, ‘Birt won’t speak to me’.”
Hussey’s wife, Lady Susan Hussey, continues to be the “senior lady of the bedchamber” to the Queen, said Eyre.
Former Royal press secretary Dickie Arbiter told the film: “He [Hussey] would have had to tell his wife.”
Hussey was never told.
In the Channel 5 documentary, the BBC is at odds with Diana’s butler Paul Burrell over whether the princess knew the answers, and if she had been coached by Bashir.
“It had been rehearsed,” said Burrell. “Diana said she had got to be perfect.
“She knew exactly what they were, and how she could answer them.”
But Richard Ayre from the BBC said: “She was told the broad areas of questioning but not the [actual] questions.”
The Bashir interview proved to be dynamite, with Diana saying “there were three people in my marriage”, referring indirectly to her husband’s long-time affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles.
She also spoke movingly about her post-natal depression and how she found little sympathy among those in the Royal household.
Bashir had struck up a friendship with Princess Diana in October 1995 after he had met her brother, Earl Spencer, to discuss a film about “surveillance of the Royal family”.
According to the film, Bashir told the Earl that he “had a source in MI5 who said that Diana was being watched by MI5”.
Diana’s butler Paul Burrell told the film: “Diana had me pulling up the floorboards, unscrewing telephones looking for bugs.
“The Princess felt she was being listened to, and that her phone was tapped.”
Burrell said late in October 1995, Bashir had a secret meeting with the Princess at Kensington Palace “arriving in the backseat of a car covered in a blanket. No one knew he was visiting”.
A month later the interview was broadcast.
Diana: The Interview That Shocked The World, Sunday 11 Oct, channel 5, 9pm
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