Channel snubs royal request

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL / TNN / Jun 6, 2007, 02:00 IST

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Channel 4 has flatly refused to bend the knee to the royal request and says it will go ahead, as scheduled, with Wednesday's broadcast of Diana.

LONDON: A right royal row has erupted between the broadcaster Channel 4 and Princes William and Harry with the television station refusing their request not to use controversial graphic photos of the last moments of Diana, as she lay dying in the mangled Mercedes in the Paris underpass 10 years ago.
Channel 4 has flatly refused to bend the knee to the royal request and says it will go ahead, as scheduled, with Wednesday's broadcast of Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel.
Exasperated royal aides have responded by releasing the full text of a letter sent on behalf of William and Harry last Friday, asking Channel 4 bosses in anguished tones to reconsider broadcasting several images depicting the crashed car while Diana was still in the wreckage, and an image of a medic administering emergency treatment to her. The Channel 4 documentary is part of a slew of programmes, concerts and books on the princess scheduled throughout this year, the 10th anniversary of Diana's death, in what many commentators predict will be "a summer haunted by Diana".
The young princes' senior aide, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton wrote in the letter, to which Channel 4 significantly did not reply by the requested cut-off date of Monday, June 4: "If it were your or my mother dying in that tunnel, would we want the scene broadcast to the nation? Indeed, would the nation so want it?"

The letter added that the images Channel 4 planned to show the world were "redolent with the atmosphere and tragedy of the closing moments of (Diana's) life". It said the images would cause the princes "acute distress" and intruded on the "privacy and dignity of (Diana's) last minutes".
But a defiant Channel 4 issued a public response to the very public release of the princes' letter, with its head Julian Bellamy insisting the broadcaster had never intended to cause William and Harry distress.

Bellamy said, "Channel 4 acknowledges the concerns expressed by the princes William and Harry about the documentary. We would like to make clear that it was not our intention in commissioning this programme to cause them distress and we do not believe it is in any way disrespectful to the memory of Princess Diana. We have weighed the princes' concerns against the legitimate public interest we believe there is in the subject of this documentary and in the still photography it includes."
Political leaders like Conservative shadow culture minister Hugo Swires have questioned Channel 4's insistence that the graphic images of Diana's last moments were in the "public interest".

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