Séamas O'Reilly: The Harry trial - and Sky News surrealism
The former Prince Harry leaving the Rolls Buildings in central London after giving evidence in the phone hacking trial against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN). A number of high-profile figures have brought claims against MGN over alleged unlawful information gathering at its titles. Picture date: Wednesday June 7, 2023.
In March 2001, 20 contestants descended on the Lakeside Shopping Centre in Essex for a Channel 5 challenge.
They stood around a Toyota Land Cruiser and placed their hands on its body, smiling and laughing for the cameras like fishermen who’d just caught a five-doored, diesel-powered, four-wheel-drive trout.
The task at hand (quite literally) was simple: whoever among the 20 challengers was the last person touching the truck would win the vehicle for themselves. A clock started ticking. Touch The Truck had begun.
With no allowance for sleep and only minor breaks for food and bathroom breaks, things unravelled. Several contestants began hallucinating.
One left the challenge because he imagined he could see a towering pile of chocolate, another because believed the truck had transformed into a massive ocean liner.
Four days after it started, 39-year-old Jerry Middleton emerged victorious, having touched the SUV for 81 hours, 43 minutes and 31 seconds.
was not a ratings success, but I watched enough of it at the time to consider it the strangest television programme I’d ever seen on British TV.
Then came this week, when I watched Sky News’ .
Given the prominence of Prince Harry’s current court battle with the Mirror Group — after this he has two more, against The Mail and The Sun, to follow — you’d be forgiven for thinking this show was self-explanatory.
It would, you presume, be an overview of the tabloids’ dealings with the prince, cataloguing the cruel and unusual surveillance they’d place him under for the entirety of his life.
It might perhaps mention the specifics of the accusations, including that the News of the World tracked his phone calls while he was still a schoolboy, or his claims that The Mirror employed private investigators to spy on him, and dispatched dozens of paparazzi to snap him on holiday while he was still a teen.
But was not a documentary, nor a primer on the case before the British courts or the issues around it.
It was, broadly speaking, a Match of the Day-style highlights programme, in which host Jonathan Samuels moderated as former Mirror editor Paul Connew and media lawyer Persephone Bridgman Baker discussed that day’s legal proceedings.
Separated by a table so tiny it looked like it was designed for a business-savvy toddler, they faced their host in one of those vast, fibre-optic villain’s lairs that news organisations tend to use.
You know the kind of thing, all shiny floors and technodrome lighting, as if the day’s headlines only adopt a sufficient degree of gravitas once delivered from inside the transparent workings of a 2003 iMac.
Which brings us to the star of the show, actor Laurence Dobiesz.
British courts do not allow cameras and, presumably, Sky News thought that the traditional route for covering such things — pastel courtroom drawings, voiced over with monotone quotes from proceedings — lacked panache, so instead they had their actor stand in the studio, directly giving Harry’s testimony to the host.
He adopted a broad facsimile of Harry voice, and wore a replica of the exact suit the prince had worn in the dock some hours earlier.
His beard, too, had been groomed into a meticulous approximation of the most famous ginger stubble on Earth, so that Mr Dobiesz, who does not bear much of a resemblance to his royal counterpart, looked a little like David Platt from , if he’d dunked the bottom half of his face in iron filings.
The overall result was one of the most tortured and embarrassing things I’ve ever seen.
If enlivening the show was their object, this was achieved, by supercharging the programme with dangerous levels of cringe that only made the cuts to punditry even stranger again.
It turns out the only thing more bewildering than watching an actor channelling Prince Harry as if he were a spirit medium possessed by some restless spirit in the afterlife, is to watch him do that and then cut to the only three people on Earth who didn’t think there was anything strange about this at all.
The pundits were, on the whole, cautiously respectful of the Prince’s case, but still lobbied charges of naivety and attention-seeking toward him.
To be clear, they were saying this about a person who has been stalked, harassed, photographed and followed since he was a baby, on the basis that he should really have known what he was getting himself into, being born.
This is but the latest in hundreds of lawsuits against British tabloids in the past 10 years, when hacking claims broke in earnest at the beginning of the last decade.
It has been proven in court that agents of the British press hacked phones, broke into homes, stole goods and fabricated sources in pursuit of stories.
They did this to celebrities, but also ordinary people and victims of crime, perhaps most repulsively when the News of The World accessed the voicemails of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowling and her family.
News Corp shuttered that paper in the ensuing fallout, and have since paid out £1.2bn in settlements relating to such cases, which have compensated litigants, but have also allowed them to deny any criminal liability for actions undertaken by their other major title, The Sun.
It is this contradiction that the prince now has in his sights.
Harry makes an odd people’s champion, but anyone appalled at the conduct of the British press should wish him to be the last man standing in all of this.
As the scion of an immensely powerful political and cultural force and an extremely wealthy private citizen, he is quite possibly the only person who could make this stand against those who buy ink by the barrel, since he is both immune to the costs, and inoculated against their revenge.
Ironically, there is little the tabloids can sling at him that he hasn’t borne every minute of the day since he wore short trousers.
There are, in short, few indignities left for him to suffer. Unless, that is, he was watching Sky News the other night.
