No surprise Diana & Dodi hit job is a shocker

A stark theme of callousness runs through the royal TV landscape right now.

A stark theme of callousness runs through the royal TV landscape right now.

Need something to cleanse your palate of the greasy, cheesy, overdone Harry & Meghan “documentary”?

Well go order a cold-pressed juice and hunker down with a cold compress for a royally adjacent hit job: Diana & Dodi: The Princess and The Playboy.

If Harry & Meghan made you queasy, this 68-minute film about the former’s mother and her fleeting love affair before her tragic death will give you full-blown motion sickness. Despite featuring scenes set in St Tropez with both Mohamed and Dodi Al Fayed’s super yachts bobbing on the horizon, it’s as shallow as a puddle. In Queensland. In December.

Harry and Meghan Netflix docuseries. Picture: Netflix

The Al Fayed name is having a moment: this time – like most things in the regal sphere – thanks to the introduction of the Harrods’ owner in the last season of The Crown.

However, it’ll be a pretty short storyline considering Mohamad blamed the royal family, namely Prince Philip, and MI6 for conspiring to kill his son who died alongside Princess Diana in that Paris tunnel in 1997.

It’s a fact royal biographer Tow Bower reels off in Diana & Dodi, a project Mohamed refused to be involved in we learn as the closing credits roll.

“They were both taking on the establishment. The script could have been written by the devil,” Bower says.

Diana, Princess of Wales with Dodi Al Fayed, walk on a pontoon in St Tropez on August 22, 1997. Picture: Patrick Bar/Nice/Matin

Diana & Dodi is a low-budget, high-drama pastiche of Harry & Meghan, minus the personally shot videos, selfies and social media screenshots. It includes an array of characters who try to paint a picture of who Dodi Al Fayed was, which was more than just the son of a powerful businessman who partied at Studio 54, held court at Annabel’s in London, bankrolled Hollywood films, including Chariots of Fire, and surrounded himself with a coterie of beautiful women. (Allegedly.) 

The cast recruited to provide character references includes two ex-girlfriends – one former American model who spends more time reprimanding a makeup artist for almost putting “eyebrow gel” on her “powdered face” before she talks about weekends on “small boats and in country houses”, and the other, a British blueblood who broke up with him when she had a hunch he was seeing someone else.

Diana and Dodi Al Fayed died in a car crash in the Pont d'Alma tunnel in Paris on 31 August 1997. Picture: Inquest Handout/PA Wire

Annie Cardone, a model turned women’s rights activist, is the most forthcoming in her testimony of the man whose life was overshadowed by a five-week relationship with the most famous wome​n in the world 25 years ago.

She claims she met the Harrods’ heir in 1996 at a London nightclub and had a “fantastic romance that lasted almost a year”.

Annie Cardone in Diana and Dodi.

“When I first met Dodi back in the ’90s, he was definitely coming off of whatever was going on with him in terms of drugs in LA,” she adds.

However, the relationship drew to a close as she believed he had lost interest in her after Di started hanging out in the south of France, much to the delight of Mohamed.

“You know I felt there was someone else,” Carbone says. 

“I sensed it. Something is different, something cool. How he was with me physically was different. I’d had enough. This is not the life I wanted. I was going to break up with him. I was going to have it out with him. 

“So, I got to his apartment and I said: ‘This is a roller coaster I don’t want to be on anymore. I love you, but I don’t want to be with you anymore. I deserve better.’”

Dodi apparently fell to the floor. “He was sobbing, begging me to stay and give him another chance … I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was just in absolute shock.”

Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed (R) looking towards an unidentified man in a frame grab from a closed circuit video footage taken in Paris shortly before the fatal car crash in which they were killed on 31 August 1997. Picture: AFP PHOTO/CORONER'S INQUEST

Shock is a consistent theme. He shocked his personal butler Rene Delorm – a man tasked with delivering his morning espresso to his room on board his yachts where he believes he witnessed Diana and Dodi’s first “connection”. He was also tasked with preparing his Paris apartment for a marriage proposal set to take place the night they died. 

In a plot twist, an inclusion of Kelly Fisher’s explosive press conference when she claimed she was engaged to Dodi in August of 1997 when Diana and his relationship made headlines. 

Infamous attorney Gloria Allred explains why Fisher went nuclear on Dodi back in the day. It wasn’t a broken heart, she decided to sue him for “breach of contract”.

Attorney Gloria Alerre in Diana & Dodi.

At the time Fisher was booking Vogue cover shoots and campaigns that earned her more than $100,000. Dodi and his dad didn’t believe that was becoming of an Al Fayed girlfriend so agreed to pay her about $500,000 to stop working.

“Mr Fayed needs to take responsibility for the woman that he ‘left at the altar’ and treated with such total disrespect,” Allred said at the press conference. 

“He threw her love away in a callous way with no regard for her whatsoever.” 

Callousness and carelessness is a theme for royal TV landscape right now. 

Netflix’s other big hit to launch amid the Harry & Meghan fanfare is Blood, Sex and Royalty. Imagine a history lesson with a soundtrack that is catchier than Coles Radio.

The two series do have many similarities despite being set almost 500 years apart. 

Turns out the more things change … nothing really changes. Both feature a hot-headed, ginger-haired male protagonist – King Henry VIII and his more contemporary cousin Prince Harry. 

Painting "King Henry VIII".

Anne Boleyn.

Blood, Sex and Royalty is a series that explores Anne Boleyn’s story from her own perspective in a modern and contemporary way. While it aims to cast her as a revolutionary and one of the original “bookish but strong female lead” characters – Anne is played by Coronation Street actress Amy James-Kelly – this series has elements of Princess Diana during the Panorama interview. “I didn’t know whether he wanted to kiss or kill me,” Anne tells a sympathetic ear in an interview setting in between various academics dropping real historical facts – including Henry’s nickname for Anne’s breasts and how Queen Elizabeth I grew up among more heretics than heroes.

Amy James-Kelly. Picture: Mike Marsland/WireImage

Each episode includes a contemporary score and modern jokes; it also walks us through how the relationship played out against a backdrop of Britain experiencing growing pains and the Tudors dynasty still in its infancy. 

However the similarities between Harry & Meghan, Diana & Dodi, Blood and Sex and Royalty – which could have also been titled “Henry & Anne” –  are stark. Jewellery is important and carries historical and hierarchical significance, duty is a heavy crown to wear and women have always used non-verbal cues to make a point. 

While Meghan opted to wear “beige and muted tones” to blend in and Diana donned her “revenge dress”, Anne did it all first and with more panache.  In one scene she wears a shockingly bright yellow gown to Catherine of Aragon’s funeral – bold in both hue and hubris. 

If only the Daily Mail was around then …

Diana & Dodi: The Princess and The Playboy ​is streaming now on Stan. Blood, Sex and Royalty ​is streaming now on Netflix.