Terry Prone: Christmas reveals a fascinating gap between Meghan Markle and reality
Meghan Markle in With Love, Meghan: Holiday Celebration. Picture: Netflix
The dog is dead and its owner is barking. That’s the truth of it. Meghan Markle is starring on Netflix in a programme about preparing for Christmas alongside a dog that died last January. Not suggesting that this is a zombie dog. It’s a perfectly acceptable alive-onscreen dog, if you like dogs in your kitchen. Or in the kitchen that belongs to someone else while, for reasons never made clear, you pretend it’s your personal kitchen. The dog’s deadness came after the wrap party. We’re not proposing the two were connected in any causal way, although wrap parties can be consequential.
The canine death might establish the timing. If the dog died at the beginning of this year, which we’re told it did, then the programme must have been made at least twelve months ago. It may even have been made before Meghan’s previous programmes were broadcast, which might explain Naomi Osaka’s presence. She isn’t a Meghan pal, which is understandable, because Meghan’s pals tend to be unknown make-up artists, whereas Osaka is a famous star tennis player.
Bringing a star tennis player onto the show to paint a plate is odd, but maybe not as odd as a star tennis player who has suffered publicly-acknowledged mental health challenges agreeing to come on to the show to paint a plate. Unless the plate painting happened before Naomi had a chance to see the first series, wherein Meghan threw edible dried flowers on anything that would hold still for flower-scattering and gave out to a TV performer “pal” for calling her the wrong name.
You can figure that if Naomi had seen any of that series, she’d have quickly rejected the invitation and told her agent that eating live bugs in a jungle reality TV show would have been a more appealing option. But because she — like Manuel — knew nothing, she ended up onscreen with a madly smiling stranger, a soon-to-die dog and a naked plate. You’d need to be hard up, honestly.
You’d also need to be hard up to be a kid in the Sussex house. Children in ordinary homes, even the homes headed by people who are semi-permanently skint, get Advent calendars that offer sweets and trinkets for each day. Advent calendars are a recent import to Ireland and some of us traditionalists disapprove of them but set that aside for a moment while we consider the home-made Advent calendars on offer in the inordinately rich Montecito home of Meghan Markle.
The days in her calendars are filled with little notes, hand-hewn by Meghan, whose hubby doesn’t figure when it comes to Advent calendars. It’s the messages on the little notes that give a clue to just how weird this woman is. They say things like, “I love you because you’re so brave.”
So this calendar is being prepared to be handed over in December which means that when the kid gets to the date containing the note, the parent has no idea whether the kid has been brave that day or abject in their cowardice. Having been a cowardly kid convinced that any passing worm was going to eat my tricycle, I would, had I got that message in an Advent calendar, have wondered why my mother was dishing out random compliments for traits I didn’t have. Why was she complimenting me for those traits instead of giving me sweets like every other decent mother did? Not saying I would have told her to shove the hand-hewn notes, but the only reason I wouldn’t have is that you didn’t argue with your mother, back then. Quiet resentment and deep-dive sulks were the order of the day.
No matter which way you slice it, the Meghan Advent calendar is such an awful idea, it’s a mystery some grounded human on the production team didn’t raise questions about the moral validity of claiming to love a toddler because they were brave. Last time I counted, you were supposed to love your kid unconditionally. They didn’t have to earn your affection by making like .
I am, for example, inordinately proud of being able to ringlet-curl the ribbons on Christmas gifts. However, what is evident in this particular programme is a fascinating physical and linguistic disconnect between the presenter and reality. It’s a perfect case study of something and that something is disquieting.
It begins with the presenter skipping in a field full of felled Christmas trees. Skipping. No woman in her mid-forties skips. It just doesn’t happen. Meghan’s skipping is accompanied by one of her statements: “Once a year, we get to do the tree thing.” True — and picking the right one is not a delight that makes us skip in our wellies. If we buy the tree at Lidl, they come corseted in net so they could be any shape inside. But we buy them, stand them up at home, de-net them and start decorating.
Cue Meghan’s next statement, this one about the baubles: “You’re really able to encapsulate your family story.”
Now, that statement demonstrates an absolute lack of insight. Meghan isn’t speaking to anybody in her family other than her mother, and her father is currently in intensive care in hospital in another country, unvisited by her. Her husband isn’t being spoken to by anyone in his family, having dumped on them as racist brawlers in his autobiography. Accordingly, encapsulating their family story in baubles is unlikely, yet she makes the statement, provides no evidence and happily moves on.
One statement after another follows, each of them carrying a moral lesson: “I just remember my heart feeling full. That is the stuff that is so soul-filling.” She puts her own rubbish into Christmas crackers — yes, the sprinkly edible flowers again — while positioning them as quintessentially British. Her local TJ Maxx gives this the lie — boxes of crackers piled floor to ceiling, this time of year, the more expensive ones packed with miniature hardware you might actually use. She portrays the British population as pulling crackers in a way some of us hadn’t heard of, up to this. “Typically, people cross arms and do it,” she states, adding, “It does feel really connective and sweet jumping up and down.” What?
It’s at that point it becomes clear that this woman is out by the side of it (to use a phrase they love in Montecito.) And that’s before the visit of her husband allows for a variation on the skipping while being passive-aggressive in a truly frightening way. Meghan delights in telling her spouse she’s made a salad containing every vegetable he hates before announcing that a particular food makes him sweat so she’s brought him a towel — all accompanied by a bouncing up and down a kid on the Toy Show wouldn’t do.
It’s nasty. It’s crazy. The dog was right to die.
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