MEDIA STUDIES

What we did was ask questions.

Not all of them have been answered

NICHOLAS OWEN

ell done!' cried the lady driving a battered old van through my local town at the end of last week. 'Great programme.' Her thumb went up to emphasise the point. The same has been said to me by lots of other 'punters', as journalists these days tend to call those who read or watch us. It has hardly been the opinion of fellow hacks, though. 'Don't read the Guardian,' warned a member of the family. My wife pointed out over the breakfast table an Exocet fired against me personally in the Daily Telegraph. One of my old employers too. And there was sustained fire from other quarters.

The fuss was occasioned by the pro- gramme Diana — Secrets Behind the Crash carried by ITV. A documentary on ITV in peak time? I guess it was bound to raise suspicions that it would be, well, controver- sial and would be going for a big audience. The previous weekend, well before trans- mission, newspaper stories of lurid inaccu- racy began to appear. They said, more or less, that the programme would explain how it was that Diana had been murdered, and that suspicions of a conspiracy were well-founded. Spice was added by the fact that a Channel 4 programme also looking into the crash in Paris would be aired the next night. 'TV Wars,' proclaimed some headlines.

May I offer a few facts in defence of my own role? The tragic accident in Paris in that tunnel beside the Seine happened at the end of August. Well before the end of the year, the independent television pro- ducer Richard Belfield looked into the cir- cumstances and decided that there were some fishy things which deserved serious scrutiny. He took his findings to ITV. The people there in charge of current affairs decided it would make a programme, and three months ago asked me, as royal corre- spondent of ITN, to present it. I looked at Belfield's findings and remember telling him that as a firm non-believer in conspira- cies = Lee Harvey Oswald did his murder unaided, say I — I thought he had done a better job than most in raising uncomfort- able issues.

The more those issues were examined, the more I could see there were some nig- gling and important puzzles. Airing them has produced the peculiar accusation from sections of a free press that I am guilty of misguided behaviour. But . . . there are questions. They are troubling. There is a shortage of coherent answers.

It is sensible, surely, to raise matters like the perplexing business of the dead driver's blood sample, with its high carbon monox- ide content. The possibility is that this may put question marks against the drink-driv- ing allegations, as The Spectator discussed a week ago. Then there has been criticism of our interviewee who said he saw an unusu- ally bright flash just before the Mercedes containing Princess Diana, Dodi Al Fayed, driver Henri Paul and bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones veered into a concrete pillar.

We set out — how surprising, seeing that we are journalists — to discover what might have caused such a blinding dazzle. We suggested a possible cause. We do not say we believe that is what actually happened. Viewers can consider what we found. Other witnesses spoke of a huge flash. So why the surprise that we should investigate?

And there is the 'secret life' of Henri Paul himself. I would have thought any reporter would have been intrigued, to say the least, to discover that this acting head of security and occasional chauffeur was regularly placing large sums of cash into a string of bank accounts.

Hang on. The Ritz . . . Mohamed Al Fayed . . and a man getting cash? Sounds uncomfortably familiar. Were his employ- ers bunging him the cash so that he could avoid tax? Good point. We asked the ques- tion. We reported the denial.

We uncovered another alarming fact: that Henri Paul had contact with intelli- gence services. His best friend told us so, in an interview which we showed. And yes, we went and got an interview with Mr Al Fayed himself. There was no advance agreement whatever about what we would ask. There were reports that I was some- People will keep raking it up.' how part of an old boy network that made me an Al Fayed fan. Untrue.

We interviewed James Hewitt as well. He said he had been threatened when someone wanted his love affair with Diana to end. He is notoriously averse to giving inter- views, even though he did peddle the story of his relationship with the Princess in a book. Perhaps there is a little bit of jealousy that we had persuaded him to talk. Again, it was for the viewer to decide whether to believe Mr Hewitt.

Among the canards, can I nail one in par- ticular? I heard guests on a radio debate agree about one thing: that ITV had clearly rushed out this documentary as a spoiler against Channel 4's effort. Obviously. Well, no. Not remotely true.

Anyway, when it came to summarising our own efforts, I used the phrase, 'trying to make sense of the senseless'. I can admit it now: the words actually came at the end of one of the hundreds of letters that peo- ple so kindly wrote to me, commenting on my part in the original coverage of Diana's death. It struck me as a wholly worthwhile objective.

The programme was made, as far, as we could manage it, to the high standards now demanded technically to hold the viewers' interest. The days of putting out shaky, grainy pictures to underscore what a tough, gritty job of investigation you are doing are gone. It was marvellous to gain access to a couple of fascinating places that Diana and Dodi visited on their last day. Great pic- tures help to tell a dramatic and riveting story. Like those newspapers who have been gunning for us, we wanted our prod- uct to look good, as well as address impor- tant issues. Highly professional folk worked like mad to achieve both ends. They did not — as one of our own researchers mistaken- ly indicated in these columns last week — seek out only witnesses who would 'prove' a security service plot to kill Diana. That was never the programme's intention.

Amid the blitzkrieg of criticism, I will fire off one opinion of my own. When I started I did not believe there was a conspiracy to kill off Diana, Princess of Wales, or Dodi Al Fayed for that matter. I still don't. I do believe, however, that certain questions that have not so far been answered should be.

The author is royal correspondent of ITN.