DIANA’S LAST DAZE
THERE’S something inherently wrong about a channel that calls itself The Learning Channel -aka TLC – doing a re-enactment of the last days of Princess Diana.
Especially if it focuses on her affair with playboy Dodi Al Fayed, complete with lovers dialogue. In bed.
I mean, I know Her Majesty’s Secret Service was everywhere, but in bed? How do they know what Diana and Dodi said or that she wore satin pajama tops only to bed?
I’m not sure I actually learned anything from “Diana: Death of a Princess” and the couple’s tepid bed scenes other than the fact that blond, cellulite-free women get men to buy them huge rings and things the morning after.
That being said, this total hybrid docudrama, which includes some top-notch British actors who play Diana and Dodi – and is strangely interlaced with actual interviews with Dodi’s dad, Mohamed Al Fayed, and the couple’s bodyguard Kez Wingfield – is quite good.
It’s even as riveting (in parts) as any tabloid story you might have read about Diana at the time of her death 10 years ago this month.
This production, which aired last week in Britain to a huge hubbub, will obviously make a quieter splashdown here simply because we Americans just don’t have as much invested in the royal family.
Sure, we loved to read the tales of the beautiful princess’ endless woes but, to us, the whole group seem vaguely like a bunch of intermarrying weirdos in crowns who open supermarkets and screw around with, and on, each other. (OK so that’s what I think, and you may not agree with me.)
Anyway, the docudrama, or film or whatever-the-heck it is, begins 12 weeks before Diana’s fatal crash and is based on the Paget Report, which was issued last December.
The report may not have put the blame on anyone, but the docudrama kind of blames everyone but the royals themselves.
Dodi, who is played by English actor Patrick Baladi, (“The Office“), is to blame for being a hothead and spoiled dilettante. His father, Mohamed, is to blame for ordering the drunken head of security for his Ritz Hotel to replace Dodi’s professional driver in order to throw off the paparazzi.
Diana (played by Genevieve O’Reilly) is to blame for being too crazed with all the people staring at her in the restaurant that fatal night and insisting on going. The paparazzi are to blame for making them crazy by mobbing Diana and Dodi wherever they went and for the high-speed chase that followed.
Surprisingly, as you can tell, the producers make no bones about Diana and her manipulation of the press. They are very clear that she’s the one who alerted the press to the fact that she was going to get cozy with Dodi aboard his daddy’s yacht (and then got upset).
She gave them the when, where and, if not the how, then at least the wherewithal to spy on them.
As you begin, so you finish.
“Diana: Last Days of a Princess”
Tomorrow at 8 p.m. on TLC

