The end of this month will mark the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, and bring with it a new wave of television programmes celebrating her life, interrogating her legacy and analysing the circumstances in which she died.
Channel 4 is getting in early with Investigating Diana: Death in Paris, a four-part series that promises previously unseen access to the people responsible for determining exactly what happened on the night of 31 August 1997: the French Brigade Criminelle, which investigated the accident at the time, and the Metropolitan Police, which did the same in 2004.
This approach allows the production team to conveniently reframe within the true-crime genre a story we already know inside out. Indeed the promotional materials even promise that it will be “told as a gripping and forensic police procedural”.
Essentially, they know exactly which audience they are tapping into here, and use all the tricks in the book to do so. Interviews with senior police officers are interspersed with clips of news footage, newspaper headlines and distorted noir-ish reconstructions heavily reliant on shadowy figures and dazzling lights.
Apparently, this is the first time several of the interviewees have spoken about their experiences, and we are taken in painstaking detail through the initial stages of the investigation: the CCTV footage of Diana and Dodi al-Fayed’s final moments at the Ritz in Paris, a profile of their driver and head of hotel security, Henri Paul, and first-person accounts from a firefighter and emergency medic who were on the scene within seconds.
There are some interesting points made about the enormous pressure the police were under, facing unprecedented scrutiny from a press and public desperate for answers and salacious detail; about the fallibility of human memory, especially when so many felt ownership over the story and attempted to insert themselves into the narrative; and also about the way that the world’s media, even as they were blamed for causing the accident, simply repurposed their money-spinning coverage of Diana’s life into coverage of her death.
But the programme, despite presenting itself as straight-shooting, pragmatic and logical, cannot help but veer towards the voyeurism present in every project that centres on Diana.
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It might purport to cut through the noise, but the opening episode includes dozens of photographs of the mangled Mercedes from every angle and a lingering reconstruction of a police officer finding Diana’s infamous pearls among the wreckage.
The multitude of conspiracy theories that emerged following the accident are highlighted as the show explores how the infancy of the internet allowed rumours to gain traction like never before.
This is also a worthwhile avenue of discussion, but it inadvertently gives undue prominence to the theories themselves, and rather gives the impression that viewers are being encouraged to employ their well honed amateur sleuth skills and reanalyse the case themselves.
There have been – and there will still be – programmes made about Diana that are considerably more vulgar than this one, where at least some attempt at restraint has been shown, but ultimately this is a cynical attempt to capitalise on our appetite for true crime within a canon of pop culture that has long been oversaturated.
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August 22, 2022 at 04:00AM
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Investigating Diana: Death in Paris is a vulgar blend of true crime and pop culture - iNews
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