The Windsors are warring over their womenfolk

Wouldn’t it be amusing to see an actual fly-on-the-wall job about Netflix’s new Harry & Meghan documentary? Imagine the scenes behind-the-scenes. The Duchess rehearses her crying face in consultation with her make-up specialist. The Duke glares at himself in a mirror. ‘I had to protect my family,’ he repeats over and over as he fingers his apricot beard. The lighting team try to coax along the impossibly capricious royals only to suffer their own nervous breakdowns after Meghan accuses them of disregarding her mental health.

Or maybe that’s not the entertainment people want. Television these days is all about ‘structured reality’ – or rubbish glossed up as revelation. It’s up to you, the viewer, to decide how much you can be bothered to disbelieve. ‘No one knows the full truth,’ says Harry, in the second teaser Netflix released this week. ‘We know the full truth.’

How does that work, exactly, H? Well, the ‘full truth’ apparently involves presenting ‘accredited pool’ royal photographs – i.e. images over which Harry and Meghan had control – as evidence of media intrusiveness. It means splicing together shots of Harry and Meghan with images of a crowd outside a Harry Potter film premiere that took place five years before the Duke and Duchess ever met – as well as a clip of a crowd waiting for the glamour model Katie Price outside court and a gang of paparazzi surrounding the car of former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Is this some sort of edgy statement about the way the media manipulates our perceptions? Or just a load of flashy cobblers? Harry & Meghan could end up being an inversion of Netflix’s other royal drama, The Crown – the characters are real but it’s far less believable.