MEERA SYAL: June 1997,
and New York City is host to the world's hottest celebrity...
...selling history's most famous wardrobe.
It was the auction of the century.
And it's yours!
The auction was a hit parade of iconic moments
in Diana's life and times.
There was the fairy tale princess from a more innocent age,
so-called Dynasty Di from the '80s,
Hollywood glamour for a glitzy new world.
And the newly independent woman of the '90s,
just when girl power was in the air.
The clothes were symbolic of a life that she led
and they were being left behind.
The auction would prove a tragic swan song,
rather than a new beginning.
And Diana's death two months later
revealed just how caught up we all were in her life.
Against the backdrop of the old order crumbling
and a new one taking its place,
Diana was a modern woman for every age...
Hugging has no harmful side effects.
...who made the waves as well as riding them.
I am not a politicalfigure, my interests are humanitarian.
To tell the story of Diana's life is to revisit the final decades
of the 20th century, in which she played so great a part.
When Diana gave birth to a second baby boy,
there was a new national sport - choosing a name.
BABY CRIES
I know! I know! Let's call him Bing. Yes.
We haven't had a Bing in the family for ages.
Prince Harry, or Henry Charles Albert David Windsor to you and me,
was the spare to go with the heir.
I name this baby Henry.
May God bless him and all who sail in him.
With up to 15 million viewers each week,
the success of Spitting Image
was a sign of an increasingly irreverent Britain.
We spent a lot of time discussing how we would portray the Royals,
but it was shocking at the time.
I mean, and the newspapers,
the red tops, particularly get furious.
"Oh, they've done a puppet of the royal baby,
"how can they be so cruel?"
BABY CRIES
I don't think that Spitting Image is as tasteless or as, um...
as cruel a programme as people like to make it out.
Spitting Image was as clear a sign as any
of a cultural shift in the '80s.
Increasingly, new money trumped old institutions,
including the Royal family
whose most mysterious member was shy Di.
We have a panic with the production team,
"We have to do Princess Diana, we have to."
She's the most famous person in the world, let alone the country.
But how? We couldn't really get the caricature right.
With her, she basically never said anything,
so that's what we should have done.
We should have perhaps not even had her appear.
I say, Diana?
DIANA: Charles.
Hubby-wubby, dear.
There's a sweet little sketch
where Prince Charles is knocking on her bedroom door
and she doesn't want to come out.
And I think that would have been really clever if we'd done that,
you never actually saw her.
So you could just imagine because the voice is very good.
I wonder could I nip in and get my trousers?
Why not?
Oh, not another pair.
The thing about doing Diana's voice
was that I hadn't really heard her speak in public much,
so I was trying to get the voice,
the very soft kind of softly spoken voice.
"Yah." Like Sloaney, like that. "Yah."
And I hope I got it right.
But what they didn't get right on Spitting Image
was the beauty, her beauty.
Spitting Image may have struggled with representing
the 22-year-old Princess, but for Diana herself,
finding a voice would become the defining mission of the decade,
now that her duties as royal broodmare had been fulfilled.
Those paying attention outside the gates of Kensington Palace
will have spotted that marriage to the Prince of Wales
was far from straightforward.
The Prince and Princess and their baby
arrived from the hospital at speed.
Then, less than an hour later, Prince Charles left to play polo,
something most new fathers would hardly dare to suggest.
According to Diana, it was after the birth of Prince Harry
that Prince Charles said to Diana,
"Oh, he's got red hair like a Spencer. And he's a boy."
Cos he was looking forward to a baby girl
who would be a Windsor.
And Diana said to me,
"Well, when he said that, the shutters came down."
Discord seemed to be the order of the day
with violent clashes between police and striking miners coming to a head
in the autumn after a six-month stand-off with the government.
What we've got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob
for the rule of law, and it must not succeed.
Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
3.3 million faced the dole queue.
British Telecom's share price was on display high above the city today.
Whilst luckier members of the public
profited from mass privatisation
and a stake in the '80s free market dream.
It was the most divided country I can remember until Brexit.
SHOUTING
You either loved Mrs Thatcher, thought she was the saviour,
or you thought she was absolutely hateful.
Like Thatcher, and a growing number of women,
Diana was not content with being a stay-at-home mum.
She wanted to carve out a meaningful public role for herself,
but she went about it with a rather softer touch than the Iron Lady.
Just two months after giving birth,
she attended her first public engagement
as a newly appointed president of the children's charity Barnardo's.
But both press and public seemed more interested in her dress sense
than the cause she was championing.
Today's new-look Princess brought out the crowds in East London.
25-year-old Julie Woolridge tours the world
posing as a Princess Diana lookalike.
She turned up today to see how she must look next.
I like it, it's stunning,
but at the same time, it's a little bit severe.
It was through Barnardo's that Diana met someone
who changed the course of her life,
and she his.
We sort of got hooked up together, mainly because, you know,
she became the president of Barnardo's
and I was an ex-Barnardo boy.
There was a kind of a synergy that the press got hold of
and nobody, including myself, did anything to dispel.
Bruce Oldfield was then a rising star on the '80s fashion scene,
and with Diana as a new client, he was about to get even bigger.
I dressed people like Faye Dunaway, Bianca Jagger, people like that.
Diana was in a different sphere, really.
But when we met, we did hit it off pretty quickly, you know.
She was quite down to earth, and I'm quite down to earth.
I think she loved something about him being an outsider
that made her have an affinity to him,
and also she liked fashion people and creative people anyway.
They were witty, they were charming, they were creative, they were bold.
They were everything that the Royal family weren't.
And she became really close to Bruce,
and I think she allowed him to influence her, she trusted him.
Hailed as the Princess and the Pauper by the press,
their friendship resulted in the transformation of Diana
from frumpy Sloane into sleek '80s fashion icon.
But he certainly had his work cut out.
To begin with, her style wasn't very current,
her style was a bit Sloane Ranger-y.
The skirts were too full,
they were too long, there was too much fabric involved.
There was a slight notion that she was following fashion.
If there was a sudden feeling in the air for new romanticism,
she would join in, and that was not a good idea.
HE LAUGHS
I did feel that there was myself and a few other designers,
who could actually steer her right.
We wanted her to be a racehorse, not a pit pony.
Pit pony and racehorse.
By the mid-80s, they'd become the perfect symbols
of a divided Britain.
And as the gulf between the haves and the have-nots widened,
Diana instinctively began positioning herself
to step into the breach.
By the mid-80s, the rallying cry was greed is good.
Get five and a half!
On both sides of the Atlantic,
young, upwardly mobile go-getters
were reaping the benefits of a new capitalist age.
But this new wealth gave rise to a new kind of red carpet event,
and leading the way was Diana.
In the '80s, charity balls became the ritual events
that people got all dressed up to go.
But Diana was in the front of it.
Ladies and gentleman, Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales.
APPLAUSE
And you knew that with her, you were gonna sell out.
In March 1985, Diana was guest of honour
at the glitziest of charity balls held at the Grosvenor House Hotel.
Amongst the celebrities who'd forked out in aid of Barnardo's
were Ringo Starr, Shirley Bassey
and Joan Collins, star of hit TV soap Dynasty.
The ball was a grand debut for Diana's radical makeover.
But the competition that night was steep.
Hello, possums!
Dame Edna was also in the line-up that night,
dressed by Bruce Oldfield.
There'll be a few replicas of this frock all over London
in a day or two, won't there?
Diana was on a mission,
not just to champion Barnardo's, but to outshine everyone there.
We made this gold lame pleated dress
and it had a bare back,
and so everyone was, "Ooh, Diana wearing a bare back."
There were hundreds and hundreds of pictures
that went out the next day
with Diana and Joan next to each other,
and it was Dynasty Di and Dynastyjoan.
And it just caught the zeitgeist.
For mere mortals wishing to keep up with these twin titans of fashion,
there were two vital looks they had to perfect.
'80s hair was power hair, wasn't it?
It was like this and sort of solid.
Yeah, you sort of had your solid hair
and you had your shoulder pads.
Shoulder pads were far more than a frivolous fashion accessory...
...they were a potent symbol of change.
It kind of gave you a sense of dominance, really.
They were like saying, "Hey, I'm not taking any shit."
By the mid-80s, the service and banking sectors were flourishing,
and women were staking a claim
in the previously male-dominated workplace like never before.
So tough jobs or not, women are taking them on
and making it to the very top.
It was called power dressing.
The royal yacht arrived off St Mark's Square at breakfast time
and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore provided the backdrop.
On a tour of Italy that spring,
Diana proved she could power dress for Britain.
But not content with just expressing herself
through her wardrobe,
she sees the rare opportunity to get her voice heard.
You say the sentence.
Mio marito e io siamo molto felici di essere qui.
You work that out. Ah, salute!
Though encouraged by Charles to show off her broken Italian,
Diana still appeared to be under his shadow.
A pretty, but nonetheless still pretty mute clothes horse,
who always deferred to her husband.
CHEERING
A few months later,
Diana took the initiative and encouraged Charles
to attend the most audacious celebrity fundraiser ever seen.
It was a tremendous achievement,
and it will be, obviously, the concert of the decade at least.
Live Aid was the brainchild of Bob Geldof
who corralled Diana's favourite popstars into performing
with only the creme de la creme invited to play.
I mean, I wouldn't go if it was just The Wurzels,
and it was The Wurzels and Bucks Fizz, I wouldn't bother.
As a pop devotee, Diana was more than happy
to give her royal seal of approval
to this uniquely '80s brand of glam philanthropy.
Live Aid was probably one of the most perfect occasions
for someone like Diana who loved music,
who loved popular culture, who loved the whole celebrity thing.
There's a picture I remember seeing, and behind her is David Bowie,
and she just looks like a kid in a toy shop.
But, barely 60 minutes in, Diana was forced to leave by Charles
who preferred to attend a polo match than stick around
for what he later privately referred to as "a pop jamboree
"that my wife made me go to".
"A pop jamboree." SHE LAUGHS
Not the coolest concert in London ever.
No, "a pop jamboree".
Cracks had started to appear in the marriage
and it didn't pass unnoticed.
Diana, what are you doing?
I'm having a satellite dish fitted to the palace roof,
so that I can watch MTV 24 hours a day, yeah?
Well, I'm not having that monstrous carbuncle.
What we need is a traditional dish.
Not all this again, Charles.
Just see how the...
We had a couple of moles.
One was a guy who had worked as a under-butler,
in... I think, in Clarence House.
Somebody who worked at the palace
was letting the stories through to Spitting Image.
And when it started to become apparent
that Diana and Charles were drifting apart,
although the press weren't making a massive thing of it,
of course, Spitting Image were.
That was satire, you know.
And so we thought it would be hilarious that we would do jokes
about them being in other countries from each other
or, you know, never seeing each other,
but, actually, that was what was happening.
On the eve of Diana's first ever visit to the US,
a well-sourced article in Vanity Fair questioned
where the real power in the royal marriage lay.
I don't even know if Tina Brown was aware of the impact
that that article will have had on the tension
that was already brewing in the royal household.
Because, you know, she'd made it clear
that Diana was popular, Diana had power.
And Diana was loved by not just Brits but by Americans as well.
And they were on the eve of going to the States,
and this was all about Charles,
this was the visit to kind of have Charles doing his royal duty.
But what they got was what was expected, you know.
Diana-mania was rampant in the States.
They loved her.
The minute she stepped off the plane,
the paps were not taking pictures of the prince,
they were there to see his wife.
REPORTER: 'Charles had been here before but this was her first visit.
'In the car park,
'an English picnic for American fans delighted to be here,
'but what did they think of the prince?'
Distinguished, but we're more used to him, she's new on the scene.
SHE CHUCKLES
The American media was really building up this trip in a big way,
for understandable reasons,
and so there were big crowds there.
There was one young woman, who I said to the cameraman,
"Keep rolling on her,"
because she was getting so excited about the whole thing.
She fulfilled her dream, she grew up and married the prince
so that's what... every little American girl thinks about.
REPORTER: 'Day two of the Chuck And Di Show -
'as the American media has dubbed it -
'has turned out more cameras than for anything else
'since the presidential inauguration.'
When we started out covering Diana, there was a sort of view of her
as a... basically, a very pretty clothes horse, a nice posh girl
who sort of got lucky and married into the royal family.
She was going to be the sidekick in the story of Prince Charles.
That did change partly because she had this very direct connection
with the public, particularly with women and girls,
and she discovered that that brought a certain kind of power.
But it wasn't just ordinary people
who were struck by Diana's magnetic power.
On their first night in Washington,
she had everyone from the President and his wife
to Hollywood A-listers at her feet.
John, are you going to, er... dance with the Princess tonight?
If she'd like me to.
Inviting john Travolta was a brilliant idea.
They put on a hell of a show that night,
and she put on a hell of a show.
And when I saw the... you know,
the picture in the paper the next morning,
I was pretty sick, if the truth was known.
No-one from the British press were there to capture
what would become the defining image of the trip, if not the decade.
Dynasty Di and the king of disco
taking to the White House dancefloor at the stroke of midnight
and cementing the two countries' famed "special relationship".
The White House has their own photographer,
and there was no English photographer in there.
And that was it, cos when we heard of what had gone on,
we just put the cameras away that night,
and went and downed a few tods.
I don't know what Charles thought of it at the time,
but, whoever arranged that certainly got their PR right that night.
Magic pictures.
The next morning, Prince Charles made his feelings quite clear.
REPORTER: 'At his first press conference,
'he wanted to talk about the exhibition,
'but they wanted to ask about her.'
Well, I'm not a... I'm not a glove puppet
so I can't answer for that I'm afraid,
but I think... I think you enjoyed it, didn't you, darling?
Be an idiot if she didn't enjoy dancing
with john Travolta, wouldn't she?
I don't think he was deliberately trying to do her down,
I just think he couldn't quite cope with the phenomenon
that had been created and he had helped create.
What had been intended as a profile building tour
for the future king of England
had turned into one long prom night for his wife.
'As people yelled complimentary remarks from across the drive,
'the Prince managed to look graciously pleased.'
It might have done wonders
for the two countries' special relationship
but it had done nothing for theirs.
APPLAUSE
While apparently revelling in the press attention,
Diana was keen to prove she was a woman of substance
as well as style.
I've been doing drugs for four years.
PCP, LSD, THC,
mushrooms, hash, hash oil, trash drugs,
and some others that I can't remember right now.
The perfect opportunity arose.
Nancy Reagan invited her along
to an open session with teen addicts
as part of her controversial anti-drug campaign, Just Say No.
And I know that we'll beat this.
We have to.
APPLAUSE
Having witnessed the potent soft power of the First Lady,
the royal mouse of Windsor
would soon make sure her voice would be heard.
Diana returned from the States on a high,
and with a renewed sense of purpose.
But for all the talk of her state-side success,
1986 would turn out to be her annus horribilis.
The irony of it all was that, at that time,
Diana was going through what she called her dark ages,
where she was depressed, where she was bulimic,
where she was suspected that her husband had gone back
to the other woman in his life, Camilla Parker Bowles.
So, for her, this was a dismal period.
REPORTER:
Press rumours about Diana's bulimia had not yet surfaced.
But on a tour of japan, no-one could fail to notice
how painfully thin she'd become, despite her best efforts
to conceal it by wearing giant shoulder pads.
We just put it down that she wasn't eating enough
cos that's kind of all we knew about... thought about at the time,
Now, I understand there was much deeper reason,
but if you look back at some of the images of the time,
you know, they told a really sad story.
Everything was brought into sharp focus
when she and Charles attended a sumo wrestling contest.
REPORTER:
CHEERING, INDISTINCT COMMENTARY
Despite her private misery, in public,
Diana still managed to look every inch the fairytale princess.
LIVELY JAZZ MUSIC
And the royal show rolled on,
but those newly-hired scriptwriters,
the Brothers Grimm, were turning their hand to soap opera.
We'd known a long time before anybody else,
the marriage was in trouble.
And protection officers were being a little more loose
with what they were telling us.
But you could sense that there was a bit of tension there,
and it wasn't as it used to be.
It just wasn't there.
Along with increasing numbers of women,
Diana turned to a higher power for guidance on her love life.
By 1986, astrology was in the ascendancy,
and horoscopes were big business.
And heading up a galaxy of star astrologers working for the tabloids
was this woman.
Diana contacted me out of the blue one Thursday morning in 1986.
It never occurred to me that there could be anything wrong.
I mean, life looked blessed as you're looking at it
through the television news.
But on that first phone call, the only thing she said to me was,
"l just want to know if there's light at the end of the tunnel."
And it was just that simple statement
that suddenly made me realise this wasn't somebody
who just wanted a kind of look around their chart
and have their ego kind of stroked.
There was something not right.
The word Camilla wasn't mentioned in those days,
but we all knew about Camilla.
It just became more and more apparent as time went on
that this was... the fairytale was coming to an end.
Determined not to be a victim,
Diana turned to her astrologer to set her on a new path.
She was feeling very disenfranchised at that point,
totally powerless in the royal family and in her marriage
and everything.
And I felt that one of the things she could do,
was to turn that around, in other words, she was suffering greatly,
and the way to address this was to help other people who suffered.
The following year, Diana found the cause
that would provide the power and agency she craved.
And in taking it on,
she attacked the prevailing prejudices
towards a deadly new virus stalking the country.
When AIDS hit, it was...
massive and terrifying.
Absolutely terrifying.
And there was a lot of misinformation about it
as there is in the early days of any disease.
It was also seen as only a gay disease,
so there was a huge backlash against the gay community as well.
I can remember some horrible slogans going around at the time
that GAY stood for Got Aids Yet?
Or that AIDS was an Arse-lnjected Death Sentence.
The government response to the virus
resulted in a hard-hitting public information campaign.
JOHN HURT:
But rather than educating the public,
it seemed intent on scaring people into not having sex at all.
There was the tombstone with the word AIDS being chiselled on it,
or there was a big iceberg, and under the water,
you could see the word AIDS.
My poor old mother grew up in South Wales.
Never once did she see a volcano or an iceberg
so what was that type of message to the likes of her?
They were inducing fear.
APPLAUSE
CLAMOUR
Given the official view,
it's hardly surprising so many gay celebrities
felt ambivalent about coming out.
Popstars who we now know
in retrospect from that era who were gay,
Elton john, Freddie Mercury, George Michael, Boy George,
they were not in inverted commas, "out" at that time.
Many of these public figures were ones
that Diana had very publicly admired.
Her alignment with the, if you like, the gay world,
it was seen as something murky and underground and not right
to being what it is, a normal part of life,
so she... I don't think you can underestimate how much Diana did.
When Diana opened Broderip Ward,
it was really an iconic event.
REPORTER:
And the way AIDS was handled by the media and governments
was a lot to do with blaming.
Stigma and blame.
So, just to see a royal go and do this, was totally amazing.
I think the Princess actually helped the message across
by the mere fact that she wasn't wearing gloves
and the mere fact that she shook hands with the patients and myself.
She knew the facts.
As somebody that knew people with AIDS, erm...
I thought, well, this is fantastic that Diana is doing this.
This is amazing because this is changing attitudes.
She's showing that you can't get it by touching.
Two years after this taboo-busting photo was taken,
Diana headed to the hospital where David Evans was working.
On the day, Diana came to officially open the ward,
it was December 1st, which was the World Aids Day,
and that was the first time I met her on that ward.
I sometimes find it still a bit too upsetting to say this.
But she was sitting next to a man with KS on his legs,
and you could see their knees were touching.
So all the fears or the stigmas around HIV,
she broke those barriers down, just by having knee-to-knee contact.
When Diana came over and shook my hand,
I... I had tears streaming.
I can remember saying, "Oh, your Royal Highness,
"you've really made it for us." Cos she had.
She talked about what I've got on,
which, er... Summer kit. Summer kit.
My summer kit, yeah.
Her astrologer's advice to channel her suffering
into helping others had worked.
And as much as she gave, she got back.
Her public role, her care for the world, for humanity,
for the suffering, was something she loved,
and to be loved by the people, kept her alive.
I mean, it was the reason she was alive.
Just one minute we've got to go. Can I just ask you this?
I saw a poll the other day, which described you
as lacking compassion for the less successful, remote, unsympathetic,
unconcerned, does this bother you?
REPORTER: 'No-one knows how many sleep rough
'on Britain's city streets each night beneath cardboard and rubbish,
'but they number at least thousands.'
In some ways, Diana was the other side
of the more brutal end of the Thatcher era.
She did enjoy visiting the sick.
She had a very caring side to her.
She also knew how to deploy that in terms of her role and her image.
So, in some ways, Diana was sort of ministering victims of that strife.
One of the criticisms often levelled at Diana
was that she didn't think about doing anything
unless there was a camera present.
And a note-taking journalist to observe it.
Well, that actually is not the case.
As a friend, just the two of us,
we went on several occasions to soup kitchens.
And she would just turn up and sort ofjoin in
with whatever was being done.
I don't think that she would have seen it
in very stark political terms.
But I think where there was a gap,
if there was a gap in social roles,
in this national kind of story, Diana was up for filling it,
she understood that she was fulfilling that role.
SIRENS BLARE
But Diana wasn't content with just fulfilling that role at home,
she was about to make her mark as a humanitarian
on the international stage.
As the 1980s drew to a close, Diana was fast becoming
one of the most photographed women in the world.
She was even rivalling some of her favourite popstars
in the celebrity stakes.
There was never a day where a picture or a story of Diana
was not in the newspapers in Britain, not one day.
CLAMOUR
She's the golden goose that lays the eggs
because put a picture of her on the cover of a newspaper
or a magazine and your sales go up.
Because Diana became such a legend as time was going on,
each national newspaper appointed a royal photographer
and a royal correspondent.
So that they would be on the case whether night, noon and day.
At that time, to be a royal reporter for one of the tabloid newspapers
was a big gig-
You got a unlimited expense account.
You did an awful lot of travelling around the world.
It was, quite frankly, the most fun you could have with your clothes on.
But it was incredibly competitive.
You were always only as good as your last story,
and there's always a pressure on to get a scoop and beat your rivals.
That pressure was considerably ramped up
when a new weekly glossy hit the newsagent's shelves.
Hello! magazine would herald a new chapter in royal press coverage.
Deference was replaced by newsworthiness,
"ls it a good story?" That was the bench mark.
There were more intimate stories coming out about the Royal family,
more about their private lives, if you like.
And the way that they lived and what they did,
Whatever she did, wherever she went, there was interest.
One evening, Kent Gavin found himself at a performance
of the Phantom of the Opera on the same night as Diana.
It was pure luck that I happened to be there on that day.
And Diana came in, sat in front of me, and she said, "Hello, Kent."
I said, "Hello, ma'am."
And she said, "Kent, you know,
"will you be at William's first day at school tomorrow?"
And I said, "Yes, of course, ma'am." And she said, "Well, Kent..."
And her quote was, "My husband won't be there tomorrow."
APPLAUSE
I knew it was a story,
so, during the interval, phoned the Mirror,
and when I come back down, she said,
"Have you been upstairs, Kent?"
And I said, "l've been onto the office, ma'am."
And she... MIMICS GIGGLE
Her little giggle.
And, of course, the headline was...
"Charles misses William's first day at school."
That was it, I feel sure she knew that would go out.
By now, Diana understood that the appetite for stories about her
could be turned to her advantage,
whether to stoke the embers of her troubled marriage
or to foreground her good causes.
REPORTER:
I fully realise that for many young people
family life is not always a happy experience.
Diana's own childhood was torn apart when, age six,
her mother left home.
The experience made her a passionate spokeswoman
for all those left behind
by Thatcher's society-free brand of politics.
I know that family life is extremely important.
And, as a mother of two small boys,
I think we may have to find a securer way
of helping our children, to nurture and prepare them to face life
as stable and confident adults.
But as she increasingly found her own voice
and gained confidence as a public figure,
Diana began to shed more than just her shyness.
We were dumped unceremoniously around about 1989.
And it was not an easy thing to take, you know,
and it was a complete - chk - shutdown.
Erm...
And, erm, you know, it didn't do a great deal for my business,
you know what I mean, to suddenly...
You know, your star client sort of decided
that she didn't wanna buy anything from you any more.
Which was fine, we're still here.
We're still making dresses, thank you very much, lots of them.
Erm... Yeah.
But it was a bit of a shock.
REPORTER:
REPORTER: 'There she is, there she is,
'she's coming down now, Princess of Wales is in Manhattan.'
On her first solo visit to the Big Apple,
Diana signalled to the world
that there were other parts of her life she was leaving behind.
REPORTER:
This was Diana being the working woman,
this was Diana choosing the charity she wanted to support.
This was Diana dictating her own schedule
and saying what she wanted to do.
One day, she was supporting and championing British manufacturing...
OPERATIC SINGING
...listening to the Welsh National Opera.
And the next day, the woman went ghetto!
The woman went downtown, Lower East Side Manhattan.
REPORTER:
CHEERING
SIRENS
Diana paid a visit to a shelter
for battered women and homeless children,
proving her reach went far beyond most Royals.
REPORTER:
The Royal Family had always had the Commonwealth,
but it was always at a... you know, shaking hands,
or looking at traditional dances or what have you.
But Diana crossed a lot of those, if you like, cultural barriers.
She didn't hold herself back.
She talked to people.
She'd embrace people no matter what their background,
their faith, their colour.
She, you know, crudely, if you like, she sided with the underdog,
and she probably saw the Black and minority ethnic communities,
as part of that sort of underclass.
And connected with them, probably slightly,
you know, aristocratically patronising, we might see it,
but coming absolutely from the kind of right place.
SIREN
Diana's whistle-stop tour of New York concluded
with her most controversial engagement,
a visit to an AIDS ward for children in Harlem.
REPORTER:
When you have the problem with the drugs,
how on earth are you going to cope with AIDS as well?
At Diana's request,
no TV crews were allowed to film her visit to the children's ward.
And the only photographs that exist were taken by the hospital staff.
When she picked up those AIDS babies,
she broke all the protocol, all the rules.
The effect in the hospital with the nurses and other people
that were there was just euphoria.
They just were amazed.
They couldn't believe that a member of the Royal Family was doing this.
She picked up a seven...
I think it was a seven-year-old child.
And they were all nervous, apparently,
cos this child was quite spirited,
they thought he was gonna kick off and embarrass them.
But he put his head on her shoulder.
She felt a connection to this kid
because she knows what it's like to be an outsider,
and she knows the power of what she can do as an activist.
And the difference it will make to these causes
where everybody else is ignoring them.
REPORTER:
Their own politicians weren't doing this.
Their own celebrities weren't doing this.
And there was this princess that was making conscious time
to come down and treat them like human beings and show compassion.
The visit would cement Diana's reputation
as a compassionate, modern Royal.
And launch her as a celebrated humanitarian on the world stage.
I was privileged to fly back with her on Concorde from New York.
I said to her, "Do you realise, ma'am, what you've done here?"
And she said, "What are you talking about?
I said, "Well, Nancy Reagan wouldn't be doing that."
She said, "Oh, I just felt emotionally I had to hold the kids."
As she picked them up, she said, "l felt like crying."
It was just... This was the girl.
This is how she was.
Next time...
How often would my mum mention Diana?
As a kid, I thought they were best friends.
The Queen Of Hearts becomes The People's Princess.
I think we forget just how dangerous the mood became.
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