by Thinus Ferreira
M-Net (DStv 101) has acquired the documentary TV special, Diana: The Interview That Shocked the World, that the channel will broadcast for DStv subscribers on Thursday 16 December at 19:30, packed with new revelations and insights about what Princess Diana said - and what she really meant - when she spoke with the BBC in 1995 and shocked the world and the British monarchy to its core.
Over 22 million people just in the United Kingdom watched the now-disgraced Panorama reporter Martin Bashir's explosive interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, as she spoke about what really happened inside her troubled and crumbling marriage to Prince Charles, and how life inside the royal family and public spotlight had affected her mental health.
By talking publicly to the BBC in the secretly organised sit-down interview, and revealing how unhappy she was in her marriage, what Charles and Camilla were doing ("There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded"), and how she knew she wouldn't be a queen one day but wanted to be a "queen of people's hearts", Diana broke every royal protocol imaginable as she exposed personal traumas and scandals inside the British royal household.
Now, 25 years later, Diana: The Interview That Shocked the World, produced by Rogan Productions with Edward McGown as producer and director, looks at how this broadcasting event of the century was orchestrated.
The TV special look back at what the interview revealed about modern society and delivers new insights into the psychological portrait of Diana herself - a naïve young woman who believed in the fairy-tale of her marriage only to lose her sense of self in its realities.
Analysts and journalists weigh in with hindsight, and with testimony from both BBC insiders and some of those who were closest to Diana, the TV special uncovers why Princess Diana chose to take this extraordinary gamble to do a public sit-down interview that was not just broadcast in the United Kingdom but watched globally at the time.
Diana: The Interview That Shocked the World also reveals how Martin Bashir, then a comparatively unknown BBC outsider, came to gain Diana's trust, and with his alleged deceit and the interview that the BBC itself has recently branded as "one of the biggest crimes in the history of broadcasting".
