Ten years after Diana's tragic death, the headlines still seem bloated with stories of commemoration and commiseration at the passing a women who's enigma seems to transcend any reality that had ever existed prior to her death.
On a day when 5 boys were found guilty of stoning a pensioner to death, the stabbing of a 17 year old person in London-why must talk of her endless kindness and saintliness consume media?
The occasional conspiracy may still abound, but the reality is that had Diana worn a seatbelt-a basic and common-sense undertaking by most, it is highly likely that her death could have been avoided. But we seem determined to venerate her not for what she was or did, but for a role we see her as filling-unfailing bringer of joy, an angel, a panacea for our times.
As a country we seem bogged down by nostalgia, and factitious reminiscences of person who had a certain charm-maybe, but also many shortcomings.
The attraction of Diana for the media is of course her popularity-when she was alive a pic of her on the front of a magazine was enough to increase sales dramatically-and even now mention of her invites great interest-and prurience.
Like the royal family themselves she is a subject of interest and curiosity, a muse for speculation and misplaced admiration. In a so called egalitarian age such beatification seems sick, a thing out of it's time and a measure of how wedded our society is by hierarchy and deference.
Of course for William, Harry and many others close to her, death was of course a real tragedy and her presence deeply missed.
But i for one think It's time for us to move on, with a sense of realism about Diana and a true perspective on how she lived and died.

And why not remember her like this... it is nice to be able to forget about the real world and news occasionly and have something a bit different and to some it may now seem an altogether different Diana how we remember her compared to who she actually was but it is a memory of an all round decent human being.
The media should make sure we don't forget her I feel. Let her be remembered as the Saintly figure we all wanted and made her become.

No harm in that... she seemed quite happy to fulfil that role and I am happy to think that of her now.

*wouldn't believe how many times I have corrected spelling mistakes in this as a tad drunk although I probably have still made loads*

The whole Diana thing just baffles me. I have had no more sympathy for her and her family than I would do anyone else who dies in a car accident. I found the national outpouring of grief faintly nauseous to be honest. I can't identify with her in the slightest.

And yes, the boys stoning the man to death, the stabbings, the increased use of guns, the increased alcohol abuse are all things that are a real concern. But i'd say that you're confusing the real world with Heat-magazine-style cult of celebrity, which are two different things. And often people want to focus on the fantasy of celebrity rather than the real-world issues. And Diana was more about the cult of celebrity than deference to the class system either, or else we'd have similar 10 year anniversaries for princess Margaret and Queen mother too. I doubt that this will be the case. And of course she was popular. And being a popular celebrity is as big as you can get here, I would think, just due to the sheer profile that people now get when they have celebrity status.

And I am pretty sure that i'm not alone on this board at finding the cult of celebrity that now permeates British culture a profoundly depressing aspect. It even comes up as part of the description of the British people in the Lonely Planet book on the UK, apparently. :(

The problem I have is that we've made this woman in to a "saint" - this is a woman who had numerous extra-marital affairs, she wasn't exactly perfect. Yes, she did lots of charity work, but actually so does Charles - The Prince's Trust? And of course there's that old argument that 10 years ago Mother Teresa died, and it was barely mentioned.

Like petalp, I have sympathy for the boys for losing their mother, and I'm sure that she was a wonderful mother to them. But I didn't know her, and so felt no more than sympathy for those who were close to her.

But I think it's slightly epidemic in this country - these mad national outpourings of either hysteria or grief. You look at Beatle-mania, and the very very bizarre reaction when Take That decided to split up, to the media coverage of the Madeleine McCann case. It just seems that occassionally the media (and therefore the general public) latch on to something and suddenly there's mass hysteria...... :blink:

Agree with a lot of what has been said already.

Of course it's always sad when somebody dies, particularly in that way, but just because she was in the royal family, to me that doesn't mean she was a better person than the man in the street who empties dustbins.

I think it should have been mentioned yes, but there are more important news stories at the moment that should have preference.

I'm glad to hear that the majority of CC are of a similar view to me. I can understand that at the time it was a big deal and worthy of lots of media coverage. I also realise that a decade on it is worthy of a retrospective article or two (note that these shouldn't be on the front page really). However what I don't understand is why broadsheets and tabloids alike of a right wing nature (e.g. Daily Express) cannot seem to go two weeks without putting Diana on their front cover. During the first six months of this year she appeared 37 times on the front cover of the Daily Mail alone! Yes she did charity work (like all Royals are supposed to), yes she was probably a great mother, but NO I don't want to hear about her anymore. She's dead, people need to realise this and move on. :rolleyes:

Wow, that's even more coverage than i would have guessed.
The BBC had it as their main story on Radio 4 this week, and while i agree it deserves comment, the extent to which she still forces real news down the agenda is surprising.

Exactly. Of course its sad she died (and in such a tragic way) but she was not any greater or more powerful than the next Mr or Mrs Joe Bloggs.

:o

OMG

She's dead??

:whistle:

This is just a little off-topic (and hopefully not inappropriate), but this thread did bring this little story to mind.

I recall a friend of mine (who just happens to be gay) telling another friend (also happens to be gay) about the death of "Diana". The guy was initially distraught as he thought that my friend was referring to Diana Ross (he is a huge fan of hers, and so that was what the name "Diana" meant to him) :blink:

Because we're distorting history-what we're actually doing by endlessly cherry picking Diana's good points is undermining the truth of her existence.
Unfortunately these days the media has a great ability to disseminate untruth and pass it off as reality.
Take for example the shooting of JFK, most people actually buy into the conspiracy theories regarding his death- there's no real evidence to counter Lee Harvey Oswald being the sole architect of Kennedy's death-and overwhelming circumstantial evidence that Oswald did shoot JFK. But films like JFK and the media enjoy propounding and artificial view of events-undermining the credibility of trust people have with governments. I'm in favour of scepticism regarding politics, but we're living in an age of out and out cynicism regarding authority-which is as destructive of democracy as almost anything else.
Whether remembering her as a saint is harmless is a mute point , how it effects her two sons, the Queen and ordinary people caught up in a media made myth
is hard to say, but the construct we have made of her life is a comment on how far the media can push and pull reality and turn it into whatever they think people want-that in a sense is the point i'm making, and is far from being innocuous.

That's what history is though in some ways BT. It is distored from the truth. It isn't just a litany of facts and objectivity. It is subjective and that's what makes it interesting.

I can see what you're getting at, saying that the media are building her up to be something she wasn't. But it was to be expected, they may have hunted her and killed her, but they made her imo. And it almost seems like poetic justice that they should venerate her memory and build her into a saint she wasn't.

She was the people's princess, there's no getting around it, and a lot of people will always feel that way.

I wonder if she will achieve Marilyn Munroe like status. I somehow doubt it. :shrug: So it's all very likely imo that the Diana myth won't outlast living memory. Perhaps it is just an erroneous perception created by the media that Diana brought light into a lot of people's lives and was a beacon of positivity, but Im not convinced it is. I see no harm in letting her continue to be that beacon, whether she was perfect or not, as a dead person.

Well I guess in her prime Diana Ross was just as famous? Am I right in saying this, as I don't really know?

Unfortunately for Diana Ross she wasn't successful enough to die in her mid thirties, so I doubt there will be quite the public outcry here or in the U.S when she dies.

She's still a pretty good singer imo though. :ok:

I thought that the guy's perception was fine! It just showed that the name "Diana" meant different things to different people. And Diana Ross does seem to be a gay icon (hence the inclusion of that aspect).

Well yes, clearly Diana Ross is still very famous. Deservedly so :)

I agree , I think BT is being over analytical in this thread although I see what he's getting at . But the simple fact is that she touched people and brought them together in a way rarely seen before . Even in Northern Ireland where people from both sides of the divide were turning up at the Belfast City hall to pay their respects together.
That can only be a good thing , regardless of whether she really deserves credit for that herself.

Well said.
It's also assumed that large displays of emotion are harmless, but remember how ugly the crowd around the palace had become towards the Queen and Charles in particular-demanding some show of emotion by the Queen herself-emotions can cuddly and nice or hateful and vile.

I remember a quote by Dr Johnson that is pertinent to this subject, googled and found this

'Accustom your children constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end'

Obviously History is subjective in the sense that it is witnessed by humans, but unless there is an attempt to defend what is 'true' we cannot make sense of the present and our place in the world.
Holocaust deniers for example are increasingly repudiated not as dangerous falsehoods but as less unfortunate 'perspectives' or 'points of view,' the gospel being that everyone is 'entitled' to his own view, no matter how flagrantly at odds with the truth it might be. Never mind that such an attitude not only disparages truth, but also erodes the legitimacy of serious opinion.
The point about JFK i made in an earlier post-is perhaps easier to establish-there is as near as damn it consensus by historians on who shot him, but that 'historical' view would not be shared by many ordinary people. The number of times when this has come up with friends who all seemed keen to believe the conspiracy theory, based no bugger all evidence (please don't mention a grassy knoll, or how poor a shot Oswald was-these are media generated myths) because of a kind of popular culture that is profoundly complacent and lazy journalism out to stoke controversy and buy public interest-because the truth isn't as exciting as the mythology.
Obviously whether you like a public figure is up to everyone individually, but the facts about Diana's life do exist-we do know certain things did happen, the problem is where people get their history from-historians or the media, these days it' s obviously the latter. The media and historical truth aren't mutually exclusive by definition-David Starkey for example is a fine presenter of popular history, but huge swathes of the media are far less turned on by what actually happened and prefer instead history 'lite'.
Plato did live before the Reformation-this is not merely a subjective view but an historical fact-if the chronology was the other way around -then we may as well pack it all in, because it would be as Nietzsche said ' There are no facts, only interpretations' and then Althea Gibson may never actually have existed :yikes:

Diana was an enigma and that's what people find so fascinating about her.She was also exceptionally attractive and photogenic and had a similar vulnerability to Monroe which was also part of her allure.I have to confess that ,although in retrospect the national outpouring of grief does seem exaggerated,at the time of her death I was genuinely upset.Personally,I believe that she had a real concern and compassion for others and her natural behaviour contrasted favourably with the stiff,totally outdated ways of the older royals.
I have sometimes wondered if she would have retained her popularity had she not died.Maybe she would have become a member of the jet set and gone from one unsuitable partner to another.I do feel that her urge to irritate the royals was behind her ill-fated relationship with Dodi Al Fayed and ,in that respect ,her self-confessed preference for 'leading from the heart rather than from the head' lead to her tragic early death.I for one think the various conspiracy theories surrounding the accident are not at all believable.

Yes much agree. This is not specifically a British thing but a worldwide phenomenon, sadly.

Much I agree with there, Fedrules, except..

Diana's tendency to undermine the Royal Family, and particulary her husband, long pre-dated her relationship with Dodi Fayed. For years when he had an egagement to promote a charity of his she'd frequently make sure she grabbed the headlines and the front pages with some competing engagement or a new dress etc..

Being upset at her death is fine - but I don't think anyone genuinely experienced 'grief' at her death other than those that knew her. Grief is that totally crushing experience resulting from a disaster that absolutely impinges upon your circle of loved ones and on the functioning of your life - it can weigh with you for the rest of your life. It seems to me that talking about shared grief was merely an excuse by people (whipped up by the press) to arrogate to themselves a part of her as a prelude to making unfair demands on her family. Her sons and friends and, yes, even Charles and the Queen (who, at the very least, saw beloved (grand)son(s) shattered by her death), will have experienced true grief. However, in the selfish rush of the newspapers (desperate to avoid the fallout of hounding her) and what my sister called the "facist mourners" (possibly aware of their own guilt - see below) to recognise their own grief the feelings of those closer to her were trampled all over, and remain so IMHO.

In so far as her 'legacy' and 'memory' are concerned, and from the cynical point of view of a marketing man, she died at about the right time. As her looks would no doubt have started to fail her and she was increasingly left to associate in the milieu of the attention-seeking jet set there was a risk, for all her good works, of the media and people becoming disenchanted with her. It was becoming increasingly impossible for her to be able to make or keep discreet and firm friends with 'normal' people for whom press intrusion is an anathema. I think her life was becoming completely impossible and that the "Great British Public" once they had had their selfish pound of voyeuristic enjoyment of her life during the good times would have started relishing bitchy articles about her and seeing photos of her at her worst 'heat' style.

The truth is that every single one of us who bought a publication being attracted by Paparazzi photos of her has a bit of blood on our hands - we absolutely cannot blame editors for publishing and selling to us what we had, and retain, an appetite for. It starts with the consumer of our celebrity culture - US.

I agree with 99% of this Barrystar.However,in Diana's defence, she was so young when she joined the 'firm' that we should not judge her more irrational and attention-seeking behaviour too harshly.I feel that Charles misused his bride in that he married her despite the fact that he was still in love with another woman and probably intended to adhere to the age-old royal tradition of having a mistress on the side.i think there are a lot of women who would be willing to undermine someone who had betrayed them in such a way.

I am not intending to judge Diana - I think that she was entitled to see herself as a wronged woman and as a 19-yr old did not get the support she needed to make it work. She was entitled to feel bad about that.

However, once she had hit her 30's and adulthood she might have tried harder to move on - in public at least. I'm only guessing, but I don't imagine that their sons enjoyed the very public feud.

Interesting to see that this topic generated 22 (now 23) comments - but as many as 193 views, which is a lot. So Diana's magnetism - for whatever reason - still functions. I must admit I found the reactions in the UK at the time of her death absolutely appalling, almost frightening in their intensity. But mass hysteria is always scary.

Although I'm not one to be particularly interested in stories about the British Royals in particular, I think it is important that stories about positive things make the news. It's depressing, if all you see are the stories about stonings and stabbings and other violence. The bad stuff needs to be covered, too, but the media tends to focus too much on that, IMO, and It sometimes makes the world seem like a more violent and hateful place than it really is.

It's not Diana's magnetism that drew me in, it is the extraordinary reaction of press and public to her death, which appalled me too.

I find this sentence quite interesting, and possibly it relates to what has already been mentioned on this thread about history being changed.

A few people quite proudly have the first editions of the papers from the day she died, where she was being absolutely slated by the press for her relationship with Dodi Fayed. Diana was already losing her popularity when she died (i'll actually never forget speaking to my grandmother after her infamous interview and being told that "that woman is a manipulative bitch" :blink: ) - she actually gained popularity through death.

I'm sure i'm stealing this from somewhere, and i'm not sure where (i'm sure someone will tell me though):she is more powerful in death than she could ever have dreamed of being in life......

Badly expressed on my part, Barrystar - I meant that the topic of Diana, in whatever shape or form, acts like a magnet and people respond.

I'd like to meet your grandmother, DJ, I think we'd have a lot in common... B)

eeerm - not to be morbid but she died a few years ago now :(

she was such an upstanding lady normally, for those words to come out of her mouth shocked me more than I can explain......and she was a big Diana fan before that interview too.

Sorry, DJ!

I see what you mean - that statement would have had a real impact. Interesting that she should have changed her mind so completely after the interview. I never was a fan, not that I was the reverse either, just not impressed / interested. But then, the Royals don't really turn me on. And we've got ours in DK, too :rolleyes:

yeah, it was a bit of a shock :blink: can't remember why she thought that now, but she was very unimpressed by it. i think possibly in her generation airing your dirty laundry in public was just not the done thing, and for diana to do it on TV was just not right :shrug:

i've never been a big fan of the Royals tbh. and I'm sure Diana was a nice lady, but i was certainly never overcome with grief over her death.

Interesting point, but are you suggesting that Diana's death is actually a positive thing for the media to cover?
It's interesting that Mother Theresa who worked relentlessly for the betterment of humankind died the same day (or very close) to Diana and got relatively meagre coverage. I don't agree with many of Theresa's Catholic views, but she gave her life for others-surely the fact that Diana's death overshadowed Mother Therasa's is a measure of the very negativity of the press you are talking about.

Of course the news is depressing, what do you suggest it should be about, the fact that spring has come again, and there are blossoms on the trees? or that Mrs Joe Bloggs achieved her first orgasm in 26 years of marriage?