Television
Windsor soap
John Diamond
t's summer and the earnest documen- tarists and the gay young things from Light Ents are all, respectively, in Tuscany and Ibiza, leaving the field clear for the soap operators. The longest-running soap of all is Windsor!, the neo-realist tale of a moth- er, her Greek husband and their extended family of ne'er-do-wells, and this week's episode came from the studios — or, at least, the cutting-rooms — of ITN (Diana: Progress of a Princess, 9.05 p.m., Sunday). It told the tale of the first ten years of the Crumbling Waleses and seemed to be based on the assumption that there is a marriage guidance counsellor somewhere who will soon be entitled to have a set of fleur-de-lys and the 'by appointment' insignia on her notepaper.
For the most part the show consisted of those little whoopsadaisy clips of Princess Diana's various supposed royal impropri- eties gummed together and set to music in the way that snooker directors sum up the whole Kensitas World Pro-Am Matchplay championship in the few snookerless min- utes before the final itself. To the strains of some tortured lyric ('What a ladeee, what a reeeeal princessssss, tumpti tumpti turn', or some such) which the music researchers had found in an ITN basement, we saw the Princess of Wales by quick turn flighty and happy and sad and irritated and caring and earnest and so on, the whole being cut together with punditry from ITN experts. Well, I say experts, but royalty is one of those subjects that everybody can be an expert about and thus nobody at all. Andrew Morton — captioned here as a `writer and journalist', but the last time I ran into him he was without the sombre glasses and was working as a tabloid royal gossipmonger — spoke as if Chas was for- ever popping in for a mug of tea, a ginger
snap and some deep counselling: 'Of course, when they were first together he couldn't keep his hands off her,' he said over some substantiating footage of Charles waving his hand in the vague direc- tion of the Princessly bottom, and 'Diana is a famous flirt', for which attribute he offered as evidence her having tweaked the president of Portugal's braces. Suzy Menkes did a wonderful impression of Dawn French's impression of the eager, vacuous royal expert on the TVam sofa: `There are really three Dianas and this outfit says I am a working woman.'
Throughout, the pundits performed those feeble acts of exegesis peculiar to royal-watchers — deducing from a shot of Charles raising an eyebrow or the colour of Diana's shoes what was really happening behind the bedroom doors of Kensington Palace. At one point, following a shot of Dempster's 'Cause for Concern' Daily Mail front page, Carol Barnes — who always seems to get stuck with the royal compila- tion voice-overs — opined that Diana had, professionally at least, reached a stage where she didn't need Charles any more. Well, of course she needs Charles: without him she becomes the ex-Princess of Wales and doesn't get to shake the hands of Aids patients any more.
Give me the real soaps every time. East- Enders went through a bad patch recently but is right back on form. At its best it is like early Pinter or, depending on the writ- er, middle-period Ayckbourn; last week's pair of episodes (the wedding overlapping with the funeral, Dot Cotton scoring her son's heroin for him, Ian Beale trying, and failing, to take delivery of a lorry-load of bailiffed meat) had elements of both. With makeweight trash like the Diana anniver- sary special around, I remain weekly grate- ful for a series where the directors know the value of a good meaningful pause, the writers know what convincing dialogue sounds like and the producer remains rightly unmoved by middlebrow press calls for less doomladen plotting.
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