Ed Perkins’s Princess Diana documentary “shouldn’t really be as fascinating as it is”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, “but I spent much of it on the edge of my seat”. It tells the story of the Princess of Wales’s life using only archive footage – with no voiceover or talking heads. This means that it cannot show us anything of Diana that hasn’t been committed to the visual record, and so it has nothing to say, for instance, about her “revealing” rivalry with her sons’ nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. And yet it is both “captivating and agonising” to see it all over again: how dazzling Diana was; how spontaneous she was, compared to the “stuffy royals”; and how “dysfunctional” she grew when the press she’d once “worked with” became “boorish and predatory”.
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