Lady Diana and the BBC interview: what is missing in The Crown?

It was the November 1995 when Lady Diana took a seat in the chair opposite the journalist Martin Bashir for the interview with BBC Panorama which marked the course of its history. What came out of that interminable conversation, we know well: bulimia, the struggles with the royal family, the betrayals of Prince Charles. Lady D.’s words have remained for decades a symbol of a dark period of the British monarchy and of the tragic accident that killed the Princess of Wales only two years later.

In The Crown 5Diana returns to that armchair, played by Elizabeth Debicki. Netflix chooses to bring “almost” all of that afternoon of television interview to the screen. Including i deceptive methods of Martin Bashir to extort as much information as possible, while the princess recounted, like a river in flood, her break with Charles, the pressures of having married the future monarch and the difficulty of raise William and Harry in a serene atmosphere.

What the series chose not to portray is the impact the interviewer’s attitude and cleverness had over the decades, the backlash extended over the years to come. The report on the life and secrets of Diana and Charles again attracted the attention of the press in October 2020when the Sunday Times revealed in an inquiry that Bashir showed two fake bank statements of the protagonist’s brother, Charles Spencer, in an attempt to convince the princess that a member of the royal staff was leaking sensitive information about their family.

When the fact came to light Count Spencer, also a journalist, wrote a letter to the director of the BBC, in “fierce” tones, accusing the broadcaster of trying to cover up and conceal the tactics used by Bashir. An internal BBC investigation in 1996 concluded that the false documents had “no relation” to the interview. Spencer did not accept the justification and accused the BBC of “sheer dishonesty”.

“The BBC has yet to apologize for what really matters here: the incredibly gross forgery of bank statements he suggested to Diana that her closest confidants were spying on her for her enemies», said Count Spencer in an interview with People.

But that’s not all. The Panorama interviewer also allegedly showed Princess Diana a fake abortion record for Tiggy Legge-Bourke, William and Harry’s childhood nanny, convincing her she would become pregnant with Prince Charles. To defend itself against the allegations, the BBC, after the start of the investigation Sunday Timesassumed the former British Supreme Court justice John Dyson to conduct an independent investigation into Diana’s appearance in Panorama.

The attorney’s report stated that Bashir, 58, breached BBC editorial guidelines, improperly manipulating Diana into giving the interview. This allowed the television station to completely detach itself from the journalist’s work: «The BBC should have made a greater effort to get to the bottom of what happened at that moment and be more transparent about what it knew. But you can’t go back in time after a quarter of a century, we can apologize fully and unconditionally. This is what we offer today.”