The Princes and the Press review: Much-hyped William and Harry documentary has little new to offer jaded viewers

Pat Stacey

Rating: 3/5

Prince Harry was always less inclined than his brother William to honour the deal the royal family made with the media

November 23 2021 03:30 PM

There was a feeling this might be really good. As it turned out, it wasn’t,” said Ian Hislop in part one of Amol Rajan’s documentary The Princes and the Press (BBC Two, Monday), about Harry and William’s complicated history with the media.

The redoubtable Hislop, wearing his Private Eye editor’s hat and as amusingly withering as ever, was talking about how Meghan Markle’s relationship with her new royal in-laws — and indeed with the tabloids — turned sour after a short-lived honeymoon period.

He could just as easily have been talking about the programme, which, after the racket it generated, was little more than a storm in a Windsor Bone China teacup.

Before anyone had seen a single moment of it — even TV critics were denied the usual preview access — it was already causing conniptions in Buckingham Palace.

A joint statement from the Queen, Charles and William, issued hours before the broadcast, railed against “overblown and unfounded claims from unnamed sources” being treated as facts.

There were dark threats that the royals might refuse to cooperate with future BBC projects. Maybe they should have waited 24 hours, because the statement now seems like a wild overreaction to an hour of TV that contained precisely zero new revelations.

Of course, it could be that Rajan, the BBC’s media editor and a man who once expressed the republican opinion that a hereditary monarchy is “absurd”, is saving all the really incendiary stuff up for next week’s concluding episode.

So far, however, as bombshells go, The Princes and the Press is all shell and no actual bomb.

Rajan, in his typically laid-back style, skipped breezily through the stuff even the least-interested among us already knows.

William and Harry developed a hatred of the press after their mother’s death, and would grow to hate them even more when the phone hacking scandal broke.

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William, though, was more willing than his brother to play the time-honoured game of footsie that goes on between the royals and the media. “Let’s call this the deal,” said Rajan.

The way the deal works is that the royals get all the castles and palaces and free money. The press get their pictures and their personal access for running some favourable stories.

Everyone is happy, or at least accepting enough not to kick up a fuss.

Except in William’s case, the stories weren’t always favourable. He was long regarded as a bit stiff and boring; suddenly, however, he was being labelled “workshy”.

Kate, adored by the press at first, began to get flak for the unforgivable crime of screwing up their shots by using her hair to hide her face.

Harry was always the more popular of the brothers with the press, even though he only grudgingly played the game. At first, hacks were even prepared to sit on stories — deviously disseminated by those working inside a different royal household (which one could that be?) — that Meghan was “difficult” and “demanding”, a Hollywood diva who bullied servants and upset the Queen by wanting to wear an unsuitable tiara on her wedding day.

The dealbreaker for Harry — and what prompted his “a line has been crossed” statement — was the thinly-veiled racism in press stories about his mixed-race wife.

With nobody other than a former press secretary to the Queen to offer a Palace perspective, Rajan turned to a posse of past and present royal correspondents, as well as an assortment of general tabloid hacks and paps, to offer what pass for insights in this uniquely British journalistic niche.

No, they insisted, Meghan Markle’s skin colour was never a factor in how they covered her. Meanwhile, a selection of dog-whistling headlines popped up on screen.

Best of all was wriggling Daily Mail hack Rachel Johnson, sister of Boris, who furiously back-pedaled away from her notorious column about how Markle would add “some exotic DNA” to the pale blue Windsor blood.

“Of course, that was a few years ago, we’d never go near that now,” she said, as though she was discussing some 19th century screed.

As Rajan drily reminded, it was only four years ago.