It all looks ever so Sandringham. Formal evening garb, dining table the length of a cricket pitch, royalty nibbling in silence. As a tableau vivant it might be lit by Lichfield and styled by Hartnell. And yet something is awry. The beautiful princess feels stifled. She grabs at the tourniquet of pearls roped round her neck, whereupon it snaps. Huge gems plop into her gloopy green soup. Dauntlessly she dips a spoon in, feeds a pearl into her mouth and takes a pulverising bite. This royal Christmas is not normal for Norfolk.
Spencer is the latest entertainment seeking to decrypt the myth of Diana, Princess of Wales. Its opening credits position it as ‘a fable from a true tragedy’, and the result is a pop horror genre flick — more Angela Carter than Barbara Cartland — whose critique of the Windsors makes Peter Morgan and Stephen Daldry look like cowering royalist lickspittles.
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