Millions of people watched the 1995 BBC Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales. Yet in 2022, the BBC announced that it would never broadcast it again after an inquiry by the former Supreme Court judge Lord Dyson ruled that the interviewer Martin Bashir had been "unreliable", "devious" and "dishonest".
Jonathan Maitland’s play The Interview shows only a few minutes of the interview and a short scene in which we see her modifying some of her phrasing during the encounter.
The first forty minutes deal with how Bashir managed to arrange the interview. This is followed by a section dealing with the actual impact of the interview in which the BBC is applauded and Bashir wins a BAFTA. The final section of the play takes us to the revelations that severely damaged Bashir’s reputation.
Yolanda Kettle is a convincing familiar Diana, always speaking gently, her head held down so she looks up at people as she speaks. The play opens with a visit from Martin Bashir (Tibu Fortes), who brings her the gift of a novel, The Alchemist, and is generous with praise of her independent-minded approach to life.
She is relaxed and lightly humorous, but cautious, putting on loud opera music to drown any listening devices she suspects might be planted. And it is just as well she isn’t heard mentioning something about a wife murdering her husband for infidelity. We see her social conscience expressing itself when she speaks about seeing his programme on infant mortality.
Bashir hasn’t at that point won her to the idea of an interview with him. She speculates about other possibilities, such as Oprah Winfrey, which he discourages by pointing to the reputation of daytime television. Chatting separately with her sceptical aide Luciana (Naomi Frederick), she admits that an interview might not be a good idea.
Bashir’s amiable, flattering style seems crude. We see him easing his way into the household by flattering the butler, Paul Burrell (Matthew Flynn), with news of his recently dead brother always wanting to meet Paul. In the next scene, he gets a laugh from the audience when he repeats the flattering sequence with Diana.
He also uses some seriously unethical tricks to win the interview. We see Bashir getting the graphic designer Matt Weissler (Ciarán Owens) to fabricate bank statements showing that the former Head of Security for the Spencer family was receiving payments from the press and the Intelligence Services. He also implies to Diana that a woman having an affair with Charles was seeking a termination. Inevitably, all this must have played its part in the “paranoia” Diana felt. At one point, she claims a member of the security services shot at her.
In the later section of the play, as an embarrassed BBC tries to claim surprise and outrage at the supposed revelations of the scandal, we get to hear some arguments against them from Bashir. He points out that the Secret Service has behaved unethically in the past, asking them if they “have any idea what they get up to in your name?” He reminds them of the fraudulent intelligence documents about Iraq that justified an illegal war. He also argues that the “monarchy is a public service that shouldn’t be free from scrutiny.” At a current cost of over 100 million pounds a year, it would seem to merit some scrutiny.
In an imagined scene in which Bashir meets Diana after her death and the announcement of the BBC ban on further screenings of the interview, they note the irony of the scandal again satisfying the Royal pressure to silence her voice.
The show is strongest in its careful chronicle of a scandal that conjures up believable performances of those involved and a sympathetic representation of some of the arguments that contest the official ethical objections.
When the UK has historically lied in the process of enslaving and murdering millions and not long ago knighted Tony Blair who used the infamous "dodgy dossier" to justify his actions, why should it be surprising that Martin Bashir forges a few documents to get Diana to say what she clearly believed anyway?