It’s fair to say that last night’s ITV interview – imaginatively entitled Harry: The Interview – between Prince Harry and his long-standing friend, the journalist Tom Bradby, has been overshadowed by the chaotic leak of Harry’s autobiography Spare. Given the sheer wealth of revelations in the book, what should have been a revelatory teaser for its publication tomorrow has now become almost anti-climatic.
Nonetheless, ITV has done an excellent job of teasing snippets from the encounter between the Duke of Sussex and Brady, and anticipation has been rife for the 90-minute show. But is it as revelatory as his parents’ televised encounters with Jonathan Dimbleby and – alas – Martin Bashir, or was it a damp squib?
Bradby, at least, fronts up immediately. ‘Harry and I have known each other for more than twenty years now, through good times’ – meaningful pause – ‘and bad.’ This, we know immediately, is not going to be a Paxman or Neil-esque interrogation, or a Maitlis-esque reputational demolition.
The only thing that Harry has to sell is half-articulated anger at those who he regards as his nemeses
But the opportunity to see the Duke asked about the verisimilitude of many of the claims that he has made, both in his lamentable Netflix series and now in Spare, is an unmissable one. It is a shame that the results are so unedifying. It may not be as painfully dull as Harry and Meghan, but that is largely because it is shorter.
Bradby’s first question – ‘Why have you written this book?’ – is hardly a challenging one, and Harry’s response, ’38 years of having my story told by so many different people, with intentional spin…it felt a good time to own my story’, sticks closely to the line established ever since he and his wife’s quasi-abdication from the Royal Family in 2020. Nonetheless it allows him another chance to sneer at the family motto of ‘never complain, never explain’, and how emotionally crass and inadequate it has proved. As he says, ‘it’s just a motto.’
Many people might believe that Prince Harry – described at one stage by Bradby as ‘the most famous person on the planet right now’ – has a point. In pitting himself and his family against the rest of ‘the Firm’, which he repeatedly describes as ‘an institution’, he has established clear blue water between his family and decades, if not centuries, of protocol and conventional expectations of how the monarchy should behave, and has set himself up as a spokesman for the truth and for integrity. Alas, he has never been a wildly articulate salesman for Brand Sussex – his wife is considerably better at the task – and this is the major pitfall for the show.
Excerpts from Spare, as narrated by Harry, are considerably more convincing (and, when he talks of his hearing of his mother’s death, inevitably affecting) than the rather bland and often evasive answers he gives, often in Californian therapy-speak. At times, it’s trivial, even ridiculous: there is a segment on Harry’s beard, and his being ordered to shave it off. It’s hardly his father confessing to adultery, or his mother saying, with deliberate emphasis, ‘there were three of us in this marriage.’
As ‘Tom’ looks on with an expression of concern, which sometimes is appropriately modulated with horror, understanding or even matey amusement, the hyperbole – ‘I fled my home country with my wife and son, fearing for our lives’ – seems laughable. While Bradby promises at the outset to challenge Harry on points of fact, the interview remains, fundamentally, an exercise in book promotion, albeit with occasional slightly more challenging questions thrown in, which noticeably rile his friend. (‘Were you actually happy on the day that your father married Camilla?’ ‘Do you think that the problem is that you’re looking back too much, not forward?’)
Yet the problem is that the only thing that Harry has to sell is half-articulated anger at those who he regards as his nemeses: his family, especially his brother-cum-nemesis, the media (especially the tabloid media, who he casually blames for ‘the culture war in the UK’), and the shadowy forces that not only took his mother away from him, but seem to have threatened his own family. He might talk of wanting a reconciliation with his family, but the complicity that he believes that they still enjoy with the dark forces of the media makes such a thing impossible. As he says, grimly, ‘silence only allows the abuser to abuse.’
One trending hashtag on Twitter during the interview was ‘#HarryIsALyingTraitor’. This is as absurd and vindictive as the worst excesses of the Sussexes. Yet it was a telling coincidence that Harry: The Interview was broadcast at the same time as the latest episode of Happy Valley. The one is a gruelling, at times disturbing, tale of betrayal, revolving around a family being torn apart from the inside by existential untruths, and exploring the lengths that people have to go to in order to survive their often tragic circumstances. The other is a drama starring Sarah Lancashire.
Those who watched the latter probably had a more cathartic experience; viewers will have learnt little from this overlong, deeply uncurious programme that does little other than entrench battle lines that show no signs of allowing a truce to be declared. Still, roll on Spare.
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