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pop star Phil Collins at a holiday camp organized by his inner-city help organization,
the Prince’s Trust, he appeared as a good communicator in contrast with his diffident
television interview manner. The ‘hook’ of the programme was the Prince’s response to
Dimbleby’s question about his marriage: ‘Did you try to be faithful…?’ The Prince
answered ‘until the marriage had irretrievably broken down’. The episode, with its
painful confessional aspect, was aimed at stopping the continual speculation about his
marriage and his affair with Camilla, whom he described as a ‘dear friend’ he would
continue to see. Viewers responded favourably to the programme; press commentators
who had indicated the opposite were forced to backtrack when street polls produced a
‘thumbs-up’ reaction to the Prince for his honesty and for his ‘caring’ image.
Elizabeth, however, who, her entourage claimed, ‘had not watched the programme’,
and other commentators thought that the Prince, in baring his soul as he had, had given
hostages to fortune and not only with his confession of adultery, which was so vague in
its timing as to be misleading. The Prince might complain about his concern for his sons’
reading newspapers with ‘Charles and Di’ stories, but the programme revealed him,
immediately after being shown in father and son shots at Balmoral, as confessing to a
television interviewer that he had been unfaithful to their mother. There had been other
aspects which, as the future constitutional monarch, he should have avoided. An early
sequence of the programme showed the Prince at one of his ‘dreaded’ programme
meetings objecting to being asked to be present at the Royal Command Film
Performance. Pulling a face, he said, ‘I thought the Queen always did it.’ The occasion is
a traditional charity fund-raising event always patronized by royalty; the Prince’s
implication that it was too boring for him to attend was offensive to the organizers and
raised a fundamental question as to what he thought he was there for anyway. It was a
symptom of the Prince’s increasing impatience with public duties which did not suit him
and his failure to comprehend, as his mother did, that fulfilling these duties was one of
the principal purposes of a monarchy. Perhaps the saddest, most revealing moment in
the whole programme came when the Prince, asked by a little Malaysian boy, ‘Who are
you?’, responded ‘I wish I knew’.
From Elizabeth’s point of view, the television programme had been bad enough but at
least it seemed to have succeeded in its object of winning back some sympathy for the
heir to the throne. Counteracting the tabloid image of him as a ‘social dinosaur’, Charles
had presented himself as a man with a vision of the future and what he saw as a
monarchy consonant with a changed Britain, as when he said he wanted to be known as
‘Defender of Faith’ (i.e. of all religious denominations in the United Kingdom) rather
than ‘Defender of the Faith’ (limited to the Protestant faith in its Anglican, Church of
England, form). Dimbleby followed up the television programme with a major
biography of the Prince, which went far beyond being ‘the book of the film’. He had
already, on the Prince’s recommendation, interviewed all his friends and confidants,
taking statements on the subject of the Prince’s marriage to be deposited in the royal
archives. Camilla Parker Bowles did not co-operate on the book, nor, to her credit, did
the Waleses’ ex-nanny, Barbara Barnes, who refused to take sides despite an appeal by