With over a fortnight still to go before the Royal nuptials at Windsor, ITV continues to impress with its dedication to relentless pre-nuptial coverage. Thursday’s offering was Prince Harry’s Story: Four Royal Weddings… just another way of repackaging the same story they’ve been selling us all week, but with extra emphasis on the groom and his amiable, occasionally mischievous personality.

The four weddings of the title were, of course, those of Charles and Diana, Charles and Camilla, William and Kate and now Harry’s own. An effective framing device that ensured the absolute maximum amount of archive footage could be utilised from royal moments good and bad over the past four decades.

We got the full history of Prince Charles’s wooing of and wedding to Diana, Princess of Wales, as well as the painful subsequent collapse of their marriage, and divorce. Followed, of course, by Diana’s death in Paris, the public spectacle surrounding her funeral and the devastating impact that all this had on the young Harry, a 12-year-old forced to grieve in the full glare of the media spotlight.

Prince Harry (left) aged seven with brother William Credit: Martin Keene

And so it continued through Harry’s well-documented teenage tearaway years, the famous drugs and Nazi uniform incidents, and on into maturity – how the Army and his service in Afghanistan transformed him, followed by charity work and the soon-to-be biggest moment of his life, marrying Meghan Markle.

What marked this documentary out was the range of contributors, who abounded from every area of the Prince’s life and interests. Singer Geri Halliwell set the tone for the rest with her opening remarks: “Harry hasn’t had it easy, you know. He’s had on hell of a journey.”

Journalists, biographers, historians and psychologists speculated on how life must have been for the young prince. Others – a butler, bodyguards, the family chef and more – had personal encounters to recall, however fleeting they may have been. Steve Hoare, guitarist in a band that played at the pub near Highgrove where a teenage Harry enjoyed drinking, recalled the young prince’s enthusiasm for Status Quo’s Rockin’ all over the World.

At the Invictus Games, Toronto 2017

Through all this what emerged was a picture of a young royal whose outgoing personality and capacity to empathise – more evident as he got older – with ordinary folk and some of world’s most dispossessed people were not dissimilar to the qualities that had made his mother such a globally popular figure. Inevitably, the phrase “the people’s prince” and similar cropped up, as did predictions that Harry and Meghan, with their joint interest in charity and campaigning, would together be high on the world’s “power couple” list. However tough Harry’s younger years might have been, the consensus most definitely – and warmly – was that with Meghan Markle he has made a perfect match.