Imagine you’ve paid good money to see a French farce – and halfway through, it turns into a Greek tragedy. Do you ask for your money back, or think ‘Well, it’s not what I expected, but I’ll give it a go anyway’? I previously wrote of Meghan Markle’s Netflix outing ‘If she can provide “content” on this level – creating a character we love to hate on a level with an Alan Partridge or a David Brent – maybe we should just cave in and award her the applause she craves, because comedy gold such as this does not come knocking every day.’ Though ‘Volume One’ made many of us ooh and aah in scandalised disbelief, it did seem largely risible. But with Harry’s words in the trailer for the second half – ‘They were happy to lie to protect my brother, they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us’ – a dagger has appeared in the air and the younger brother is, for his own tormented reasons, attempting to plunge it between the shoulder blades of the elder.
But back to the build-up. We left the Gruesome Twosome at the end of episode one on the eve of their big reveal as a couple, having a last night of anonymous fun at a costume party which the pair attended dressed as combatants, in camouflage and gas-masks, which is very appropriate as they’re such brave little soldiers. Meghan, like the state trooper she is, throws herself wholeheartedly into a life of service, dispensing hugs to tots and bananas to sex-workers like her life – or at least her new livelihood – depends on it. And then it’s the Big Day – ‘All I wanted was a mimosa, a croissant and to play that song Going To The Chapel’ Meghan confides, with all the arch intimacy of an actress on daytime TV confiding that yes, she has bladder problems too. You can see why she never made it in Hollywood – if you can’t fake that sincerity, you’re finished.
You can see why Meghan never made it in Hollywood – if you can’t fake that sincerity, you’re finished
At her wedding, when she finally gets to mix with the Hollywood A-list who you imagine had never heard of her during her actual showbiz career – Oprah, the Clooneys – Meghan finally finds her likely longed-for station in life. She actually seems the better person of the pair; Prince Harry (in his weird new transatlantic accent) recalls his Special Day with a real contempt for the public dripping from his voice: ‘We were Diana’s boys… we need to have public weddings… they had William’s, now mine – job done.’ The fraternal sniping has started – William portrayed as a wimp for simply doing his duty.
‘It was a moment when the world paused and celebrated love’ Meghan’s mate gushes – but it’s down to earth with a bump when our storybook heroine is condemned to start her new life in Nottingham Cottage, which it is implied would have better suited the Seven Dwarves. It’s a sumptuous smorgasbord of choice, but this is when the Sussexes show themselves at their most unlikeable, describing how they had to improve the house like ordinary people.(Referring to his gardening efforts, M points out ‘H with a ho!’ – best laugh in the entire thing.) Most newlyweds would be delighted with a house in the grounds of a central London palace, but they react like they’ve been given a prefab in Penge; it’s worth noting that William and Kate lived here before they had children, so the decor-related snipes are aimed Wales-ward again.
Meghan highlights the harmoniousness of her relationship with the public’s much-beloved late Queen, though this too is unattractive in its own way; as she mistily recalled their time together, I expected her to burst into a verse of ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma.’ But for a while the sense of service beyond self seems to rub off; here she is getting stuck in at the kitchens which feed the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, which Harry’s old Etonian mate reminds us was an unlovely building next to some of the most expensive housing in London. (It really is as though the Sussexes and their shills believe in a form of magical thinking which renders you not privileged if you point out enough that other peopleare privileged, in common with many wealthy holders of ‘luxury beliefs’.) When she publishes a recipe book to raise funds for the local community, it’s all going swimmingly. But who’s this tadpole? Why, it’s none other than little Archie, their first born, in a candid snap of him as a foetus. (Neverlet it be said that the Sussexes aren’t willing to share snaps of their spawn with us mere mortals – they just want a hundred-million-dollar series to do so.)
And now, the commentary tells us, H&M were so popular that they became ‘a threat’ to ‘the Palace’ – specifically to William and Kate. Prince Harry visibly glows as he describes how ‘someone who is meant to be a supporting act steals the limelight from someone who was born to do this’. Boring old Charles, Wills and Kate are shown shaking hands – why couldn’t they have done something funky, like fist bump? – and there’s a new chance to hitch Meghan’s shabby wagon to Diana’s dark star, comparing how she previously outshone her old-school husband.
M’s alleged diva demands are catnip to a press tiring of applauding a bad actress, and the Teary Wives of Windsor scrap kicks off. Who made who cry? Who wanted which tiara? Who ate all the avocados? As Harry, with the zeal of the fanatic in his eye, lists the trivialities which Kate was allowed to get away with but Meghan wasn’t, he seems truly pathetic – not a prince but a suburban hairdresser attempting to whip up a cat-fight between clients. When an uppity peasant in Liverpool dares to tell Meghan that she’s not treating her father well, she says she has suicidal thoughts and that she is ‘forbidden’ from seeking professional help. Would a family whose pet patronage is mental health shun her as if she had syphilis?
Now the Great Escape is underway. Harry’s gloves come off, and he goes for his father and brother like an irate ginger Slinky, accusing them of lying (‘There’s leaking, but there’s also planting’ as he puts it, making one wish that he could have found inner happiness talking to famously discreet pot-plants, as his dad did, rather than to the paying public) and later of screaming scarily at him. ‘The saddest is the wedge this has driven between me and my brother,’ Harry opines, very much recalling the boy who killed his parents and then asked the jury for clemency as he was an orphan. When the Mail get involved in the squabble between Meghan and her dad, our courageous pair decide that they can no longer live their best lives in a society with a free press, and set out for their current life of low-profile, non-profit-making good works in the isolated outlands of Los Angeles, entertainment capital of the world.
And so the world’s most expensive – and dullest – home movie trundles to an end. I’ve never been the greatest fan of ‘therapy’ – unless you have a bad back – and this pair prove that endless contemplation of one’s navel is not at all the same as gaining emotional intelligence. After six hours of this high-end effluent, recollections may vary; at times the couple seemed like Verruca Salt and Violet Elizabeth Bott on the playdate from hell. The pair also struck me as resembling creatures from a satire such as Gulliver’s Travels – tiny little stinted people who believe they’re huge and important and act accordingly, to amusing optics.
Likely, both believe that they’re up there with the world’s legendary lovers, but there’s more than a whiff of the imperious Miss Piggy and her adoring Kermit about them, liable to dwindle into the brittle bickering of Hinge and Bracket as the sex wears off. I feel that Meghan may suffer from Princess Syndrome – big in the USA – which purports that ‘every girl is a princess’ or at least should be treated like one. She may be peeved that the radiant Kate is one, because doesn’t ‘Duchess’ perhaps sound a little stodgy, with echoes of busty pub landladies and calorific ways to cook potatoes? On the sidelines, serious people like the writer Afua Hirsh and the historian David Olusoga OBE (Order of the British Empire, cough) have, by taking part in the show, made themselves look woefully like they are seeking the favour of Queen Mean Girl Regina George in that old Lindsay Lohan film.
At times Harry sounds literally insane, as when he calls trolling ‘a global humanitarian crisis’ – there’s been lunacy in that family before (see King George III) and if James Hewitt’s not his dad, then he might well have copped for the genes. Meghan comes across less crazy but more dim; at one point she posits the notion that she shouldn’t be trolled ‘because I’m a mom.’ Well,I too am a ‘mom’, to my son the suicide – whose image in various imagined death contortions fans of Miss Markle’s have sent me in the past when I was critical of her. And did I complain? No, I corrected their grammar and returned them to the senders. Because I am not a drip.
The soundtrack features some beautiful soul songs, inappropriate for this shallow and soulless pair, but one it lacked was an old number I love, performed by Ann Peebles, called ‘I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down’ which would have been appropriate. Watching footage of them mucking about in the dead Queen’s treasured playhouse – ‘Y Bwthyn Bach’ or ‘The Little House’, presented to her as a child as a gift from Wales, and never opened to the public – I couldn’t help thinking there is a spiteful child side to them. Their apparent hatred of the Waleses is that of brats who have finally been told ‘No’ – that someone is ahead of them in the queue and there’s nothing they can do about it.
But nothing will ever be good enough for these two, not for long. Is there the occasional seditious glint in H’s eye, as when he watches M mimicking curtsying to the Queen? The human spirit is a wonderful thing, and cannot be easily crushed even in the most luxurious and uxorious circumstances. I have an inkling that these two will be arguing about who gets custody of the rescue hens when William and Kate have ascended serenely to their thrones. Contemplating his own circa 19 toilets, which now look so empty and are due to be divided between him and his wife – maybe about to embark on her third marriage to a tech billionaire – the lost Prince may wonder if it was all worth it. Never mind, at least he’ll have a lot of toilet tissue to hand to mop up his hundred million dollar tears.
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