"An Interview with HRH The Princess of Wales" is an episode of the BBC documentary series Panorama which was broadcast on BBC1 on 20 November 1995. The 54-minute programme saw Diana, Princess of Wales, interviewed by journalist Martin Bashir about her relationship with her husband, Charles, Prince of Wales, and the reasons for their subsequent separation. The programme was watched by nearly 23 million viewers in the UK. The worldwide audience was estimated at 200 million across 100 countries. In the UK, the National Grid reported a 1,000 MW surge in demand for power after the programme. At the time, the BBC hailed the interview as the scoop of a generation.
In 2020, BBC Director-General Tim Davie apologised to the princess's brother Lord Spencer because Bashir had used forged bank statements to win his and Diana's trust to secure the interview. Former Justice of the Supreme Court Lord Dyson conducted an independent inquiry into the issue. Dyson's inquiry found Bashir guilty of deceit and of breaching BBC editorial conduct to obtain the interview.
Background
Martin Bashir's interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, was conducted in Diana's sitting room at Kensington Palace on 5 November 1995 (Guy Fawkes Night); the room later became the playden for Princes William and Harry. The camera and recording equipment had been brought into the palace under the pretence of installing a new hi-fi system. In addition to Bashir, Panorama producer Mike Robinson and a cameraman, Tony Poole, were also present. To ensure the secrecy of the interview, the final transmission tape was kept under constant surveillance and security guards were present during its editing. In the week following the recording of the interview, the BBC's controller of editorial policy, Richard Ayre; the head of weekly television current affairs programmes, Tim Gardam; and Panorama editor Steve Hewlett watched the interview at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne.
The Board of Governors of the BBC were deliberately kept unaware of the interview by Panorama executives and by the Director-General of the BBC, John Birt. The chairman of the board of governors, Marmaduke Hussey, was married to Lady Susan Hussey, a confidant of Queen Elizabeth II and a woman of the bedchamber. It was feared that the interview might have been discredited ahead of broadcast or possibly never shown if Hussey had been aware. The official royal liaison person between the BBC and the British royal family, Jim Moir, was also kept unaware. The film director David Puttnam had advised Diana against the interview and subsequently said that he would "never forgive John Birt for not explaining to Diana the implications of what she was doing and for not alerting [Marmaduke] Hussey".
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother brought forward the date of an operation on her hip to the week of the broadcast of the interview with the expectation that should she die - she was aged 95 - Diana's interview would receive substantially less coverage in the media. Ironically, some derogatory comments about the Queen Mother from the Princess were removed from the final cut.
Content
Diana spoke of her early expectations of her marriage to Prince Charles and how she "desperately wanted it to work" in light of her own parents' divorce. The constant presence of the media and their focus on her led her to perceive herself as a "good product that sits on the shelf...and people make a lot of money out of you". The effect of the initial trip to Australia and New Zealand in 1983 was that she returned as "...a different person, I realised the sense of duty...and the demanding role I now found myself in". She was uncomfortable with being the centre of attention over her husband and had found an affinity with people who'd been "rejected by society".
Diana said that she had felt enormous relief at her pregnancy with William but that she subsequently suffered from post natal depression, which led her to be labelled by others as unstable and mentally unbalanced. She thus began self harming and became bulimic, both of which intensified following Charles's resumption of his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. She famously noted, in reference to her husband's relationship with Parker Bowles, that "there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded". Diana felt that she had been compelled to perform her role as Princess of Wales and that her behaviour had led friends of Charles to indicate "that I was again unstable and sick and should be put in a home of some sort...I was almost an embarrassment".
