oh excellent Another documentary about Diana, Princess of Wales. Just what we need. Days after The Princess from Sky Documentaries comes Channel 4’s new series Investigating Diana: Death in Paris. How else can the 25th anniversary of his death be marked and monetized? Your workout playlist can be downloaded from Spotify, perhaps? A volume of princess-related poetry edited by Gyles Brandreth in which John Cooper Clarke rhymes Diana with a key? A clap at the door at the time of his death, because this sort of thing really worked for the NHS?
Not that directors Will Jessop and Barnaby Peel aren’t geniuses. They’ve done a four-part series, micro-analyzing the circumstances of her death in the Alma Tunnel on August 31, 1997, stretching and stretching historical material like cellophane over faded bouquets of flowers outside Kensington Palace. Only occasionally can you hear that tear sound. Once again, we hear Earl Spencer’s funeral oration; once again, Diana fake-looking over her shoulder in old snapshots; once again Tony Blair hitched his New Labor pony to his celebrity carriage with his oxymoronic invocation of the People’s Princess.
Jessop and Peel shrewdly point out that her death turbocharged the mutation of the children’s internet into a post-truth tool, allowing all the disgruntled pussies to peddle their conspiracy theories about her demise. But more importantly, Jessop and Peel have reworked Diana’s death so that Investigating Diana appears as if it wants to be this summer’s Tiger King or Making a Murderer. In 1997, Diana’s death meant, in part, the softening of Britain’s stiff upper lip, a curious trigger of grief among many for a woman they barely knew. Today it means something else: investigating Diana rewards our obsessive gaze with a real-life CSI Paris that drags the story out at inordinate length.
That said, there are moments of sly art. Eric Gigou, the Brigada Criminelle investigator, remembers having released the paparazzi from custody without charge. At that moment, he told them that beyond that door, there was a wall of snappers ready to take their pictures. The shot lingers, for several seconds, on the street door framed by ominous flash lights, the hunters about to become the hunted.
But did the paparazzi drive Diana, Dodi Fayed and their driver Henri Paul to their deaths, as Earl Spencer suggested at her funeral? Someone scrawled “Paparazzi – Assassins” near the crime scene. Another graffiti in English read: “The Queen did it.” Are we to infer that the popes worked not for the crumbs of media moguls, but for Her Majesty’s Secret Service? And that the repeated details of the photographers interviewed here are just smokescreens? Jacques Langevin came to Eichmann’s defense: “I was just doing my job.” And what a job – some paps were allegedly earning £1m a year just from Diana Pix. “I didn’t kill anyone,” Langevin adds. Very well – there seems to be no evidence to contradict this claim.
Certainly, Gigou and his team found nothing to suggest that Paul, the driver quickly demonized by the British tabloids for being four times over the French legal alcohol limit when the Mercedes 600 crashed at 121 mph in that tunnel, was guilty The show hides the possibility that his smears in the British press may have served to divert us from the perpetrators who, mourner Mohamed Al Fayed told us in contemporary footage, murdered his son and his lover.
Two witnesses interviewed in Investigating Diana lend slight credence to a contract killing. François Levistre remembers a motorcycle cutting in front of the Mercedes and a flash of light, possibly from a camera, causing the car carrying Diana and Dodi to crash. The police could not get hold of this account.
Sabine Dauzonne saw a white Fiat Uno come out of the tunnel shortly after the accident. He noticed the Paris plates and especially a tanned driver, a muzzled dog on the back and the car’s broken tail light. The then head of the Brigada Criminelle, Martine Monteil, found white paint from another car in the wreckage of the Mercedes and, on the nearby tarmac, pieces of a broken taillight and, even more curiously, pearls he assumed she was wearing Diana as she was. hasten his death. Nothing is conclusive.
Hilary Mantel once wrote, “The princess we invented to fill a vacancy had little to do with any real person.” A quarter of a century after his death, we still fill that vacancy, filling it with speculation and the delusional prospect of closure. Jessop and Peel cleverly end the opening episode with the sole survivor of the Mercedes, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, walking out of hospital five weeks after the crash. Maybe I could solve all these questions about the death of the princess once and for all. Probably not, but that’s the possibility that’s left hanging to get us back to episode two.
I wonder how we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of his death?