Diana and I review: A dramatic attempt to describe the impact of Princess Diana’s death
What I remember most vividly about August 1997 is my offer to redecorate the kitchen in return for a rent reduction.
The landlord said, “Don’t do no hippy colours, will you?” and left me to it.
I went for Light Stone, or at least, I went for what it said on the cheapest tin I could find.
After five brushstrokes that Light Stone was Battleship Grey but I kept going in the hope that it might improve. Hour after hour, friends, visitors, even a nosy postman passed through and advised me to stop.
I couldn’t and the more time I spent on the doomed mission, the less possible it was to abort it.
DIANA AND I (BBC2), a dramatic attempt to describe the impact of Princess Diana’s death through the stories of four, ordinary people, was by no means a doomed mission.
You did wonder, sometimes, though, if writer Jeremy Brock had ignored the little voices telling him to rethink. It was a clever idea, a quartet of characters heading, like Chaucer’s pilgrims, to the final sea of flowers at Kensington Palace.
A Scottish florist escaped her ailing mum and ailing business with a wild plan to flog blooms to the mourners. A lad whose Diana-adoring mum had died on the same night planned a tribute to both women, shyly seeking help from his next-door neighbour.
Esther Rantzen reflects on Princess Diana and Camilla's relationship
A harried Asian wife took a break from the house and the debts and her near-delusional husband to visit a London uncle. And in Paris, an ambitious young journalist left his honeymoon to pursue the story of a lifetime.
The latter was a deeply repetitive sequence of her waiting for him in various idyllic spots while he went round chasing leads. It was one scene, again and again, until she packed her bags and left.
The tale of Yasmin (Kiran Sonia Sawar) was equally hard to appreciate. It felt real, the debtridden hubby who kept chanting “I am a successful businessman with many responsibilities” like a mantra, the thrilling moment Yasmin sang an off-key Des’ree song in a karaoke bar.
The lines were howlingly bad with every character sledgehammering their various messages home instead of talking like real people.
There couldn’t have been a greater contrast with the other two stories which were tender and funny. Florist Mary (Tamsin Greig) and old friend Gordie (John Gordon Sinclair) bickered their way to London in a borrowed coach full of flowers intending, shamelessly, to make a fortune.They failed but they finally found each other.
Death and divorce meanwhile had cheated Jack (Nico Mirallegro) of the coming-out moment he’d planned for so long, so he did it anyway as he and his estranged dad (Neil Morrissey) stood over the coffin of his just-passed mother.
“We appreciate you being so open,” Jack’s dad said, glancing awkwardly down at the body. “Don’t we, Clare?”
It felt, in the end, like a play of two halves. One was brilliant, the other just stuck in because a quartet had been promised.
WHITE KID, BROWN KID (C4) was a bold experiment in boundary crossing in the deeply segregated West Yorkshire town of Dewsbury. Who could say whether teenagers Farhana and Siobhan will really develop a friendship over time?
If they don’t, it won’t necessarily be the culture clash that’s to blame. Being followed around by a film crew would put the mockers on most relationships.