The Harry and Meghan Show

It’s the royal soap opera; and none of us can turn away…

 

The key thing about understanding the dynamic between Harry and Meghan, still styled as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, despite flouncing out of the royal family many years ago, is that they are coming at the fame game from opposite ends of the spectrum. Prince Harry, the second son of Princess Diana, has spent his entire adult life trying to lower his profile, dodging the media, and hiding from the paparazzi. Meghan Markle, C-list actress from a cable show (which is as far from Hollywood as you can get), on the other hand, has spent her entire life trying to raise her profile by getting the media interested in her. And by marrying Prince Harry, she has certainly got more than she bargained for. 

 

But as you watch Harry and Meghan, the Netflix show on the pair’s life, you realize that instead of Harry elevating Meghan to the A-list, she has succeeded in dragging him down to the C-list. Consider this for a moment. Can you imagine any other A-list couple – think the Obamas or the Clooneys, on whom the Markles clearly model themselves – agreeing to let TV cameras into their lives to this extent? Can you see them revealing the early text messages they exchanged, intimate photos of their dating days, pictures and videos of their children? Do you really think any A-lister would offer up their life for public delectation as Harry and Meghan have? I think not. The Duke and Duchess of Netflix, on the other hand, have no problem whatsoever in invading their own privacy in spades – all the while complaining about the media intrusion into their lives. 

 

As the series unravels you can tell that Meghan is in her element; she is finally playing the lead in a show, rather than a supporting part as she had done throughout her career. And it is the role of a lifetime – more so because it is her lifetime that is being examined, burnished and then presented to what she hopes is an adoring public. It is Harry who has been reduced to playing the supporting role, nodding along to her more outrageous claims, and looking angry and helpless in equal measure as she dissolves into tears. But whatever the truth of all their claims of ill-treatment by the royal family, one thing is without doubt: this is Meghan’s world; Harry just merely lives (and whines) in it.

 

That said, it is easy to feel sorry for the artist formally known as Prince. In some ways, he is still the 12-year-old trapped in the trauma of losing his mother in a tragic accident and then being made to walk behind her coffin in front of weeping crowds. So, it is entirely understandable that he constantly compares Meghan to his mother and insists that they are essentially the same person. You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to understand why he wants to turn his wife into his mother – this way, he can finally save her. (Certainly, Harry himself is Diana incarnate in this ‘docu-series’: hurt; seeking revenge; throwing grenades into the heart of the royal family; attacking his brother; accusing his father of untruths; and the royal family of racism, or what he kindly refers to as ‘unconscious bias’.)

 

Sadly, for Harry, there are some ways in which Meghan is exactly like his mother. No, not like the Sainted Diana of Fond Memory, who has now taken over the public imagination, but the media-savvy, manipulative, vindictive Diana who has been conveniently airbrushed from history after her death. This was the Diana who was not speaking to her mother, Francis Shand-Kydd, when she died, having frozen her out and returned her letters unopened (Thomas Markle, anyone?). This was the Diana who would leak stories to favoured news outlets and sneak in her favourite journalists into Kensington Palace by hiding them in the trunk of her car. 

 

It was not privacy that either Diana or Meghan aspired to. It was control of the narrative. And that is something that Meghan and her husband have certainly achieved in his six-part series. The Duke once compared life in the royal family to being ‘a cross between the Truman show and a zoo’. Well, he’s now gone and made his own Truman show, starring in it along with his entire family.

 

I hope the money was worth it.