TV: Debunking the St Diana myth

By Frances Grant

If you can't or don't care to remember where you were on the day when the Princess of Wales was killed in a car crash in Paris you are not alone.

"Who cares?" asked journalist Christopher Hitchens in last night's TV One documentary examining the extraordinary public reaction in Britain to Diana's death, Diana - the Mourning After.

Just two years after the tragedy which elevated Diana to the status of sainthood, Hitchens' tone of disgust could still be regarded by many as pure sacrilege.

But time seems to have healed the traumatised surprisingly swiftly.

On the first anniversary of her death the media were out in force looking for a resurgence of that overwhelming tide of grief.

The silliness of those scenes of reporters outside a quiet Kensington Palace, desperately trying to account for the visible lack of public remembrance, begged the question: what role did the media play in the first place in painting reaction to the death of the divorced wife of the heir to the throne as an all-consuming, national - even global - passion?

Hitchens, a left-leaning journalist, author and columnist with a reputation for iconoclasm, was raring to provide a few answers.

When the media start presenting reports in terms of an all-encompassing "we," and describ-ing events emotively as a "national mood," objectivity and free speech are the immediate victims, went his argument.

Forty-one per cent of Britons had their telly sets switched off on the day of Diana's funeral. Those not watching constituted another Britain, he asserted, one "not swept away by demagogues, superstars and messiahs."

To prove his point, Hitchens went to seek out some of the dissidents who found the whole thing kooky, spooky or plain sinister.

His most telling example was the woman whose parents had been killed in a car crash abroad. Their conversation on the nature of bereavement was ironically intercut with the images of the crowds bearing flowers and teddy bears for the departed Diana.

But strangely, given Hitchens' thesis of general suppression of contrary points of view, two of his subjects were those who had expressed their concerns in national newspapers.

And another opponent of the mass hysteria was Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, which satirised the media coverage of "Diana week" and was pulled from shop shelves.

The pair's analysis of the words of Elton John's mass-selling funeral hymn, Candle in the Wind, was hilarious, but like interviewing the usual suspects.

British comedians, he also found, were victims of suppression, warned to temper their jokes. "It had the logic of a Disney production and the enforcement of a Nazi state," was one's summation of that week.

Shame about Hitchens' enthusiasm for that comparison to fascism - yes, a couple of tourists were jailed for pinching teddy bears but that hardly equates to the murder of millions - because the documentary was mostly a timely reflection of the dangers of irrational mass reaction and synthetic celebrity culture.

For those of us who bridle at assumptions, in the media or in general opinion, that everybody in the nation has the same emotional investment in events such as the death of celebrities or even results of sports matches, many of Hitchens' points were music to the ears.