Voices: Harry and Meghan’s crime? Saying no to the Piers Morgan principle

To say that six full hours of television programming about two extremely uninteresting people with extremely high opinions of themselves is too much would be to miss the point.

In the world in which Harry and Meghan have chosen to live, which is entirely dysfunctional but significantly less dysfunctional than the one they left it for, six hours of nothing is absolutely nothing. By way of comparison, The Real Housewives of Cheshire has knocked out 162 hours of nothing. To have fully kept up with the Kardashians to this point will have removed over a week of your existence.

So six hours of talking very slowly about your favourite subject – yourself – is not a performance without an audience. Quite the opposite.

And mainly, it is an interesting tale. There may be no discernible difference between Towie, Made in Chelsea and the original – and still the best – reality TV show out there, the royal family. But it cannot be ignored that only one of these very low rent productions has an essential and important role in the constitution of the United Kingdom.

It also can’t be ignored that Harry and Meghan have most certainly earned the right to tell their story, given the vast number of people who have taken it upon themselves to tell it for them. And it makes for awkward viewing for the many, many millions of British people who stopped what they were doing for more than a week to pay reverence to an institution that is a demonstrable mess.

It’s arguably best to understand each hour-long episode of Harry & Meghan as a home workout video, so frequent and so violent are the squats required to at one moment leap up and turn the thing off as though your life depended on it, and then at the next find yourself almost pinned to the sofa, compelled to see more.

There’s no point pretending that Harry and Meghan’s story doesn’t tell bleak truths about how our increasingly odd country functions. At one point, there’s a 13-year-old Harry, wandering into his first day at Eton College, ignoring the photographers shouting out his name, but somewhere in his child’s mind, knowing that he is taking part in a scene not wholly dissimilar to the one in which his own mother had been killed a year before.

Then he’s talking about the difficulties of dating women, the contradictions and the tensions of liking someone but then having to inflict his life upon them. It is perfectly possible to be entirely uninterested in the royal soap opera, but still permit yourself to ponder what goes through the mind of a young man, falling in love with a young woman, and thus bringing her into the precise same situation that cost his mother her life.

It is hardly surprising that such a scenario has piqued the interest of dramatists, in the form of The Crown. (It’s a well worn joke by now, but in this case, it is genuinely curious to see quite what Netflix will do, when its ongoing dramatisation of the royal family gets to the bit about the Netflix documentary.)

Mainly, it’s a story about two people saying no to what is best described as the “Piers Morgan principle”. His guiding philosophy, in his days as a tabloid editor, was that famous people have no right to enjoy the good side of fame and wealth and power without enduring the scrutiny that comes with it.

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It’s a simple philosophy (from a simple man), but real life and real people are more complicated. Both Harry and Meghan speak of their early days of dating, requiring disguises and anti-surveillance driving. Harry is self-evidently a man who can’t cope with the consequences of a fame he never sought, but simultaneously enjoys some of the privileges. It is a hypocrisy of which absolutely all of us are guilty.

Once again, we are reminded that it is monarchists, not republicans, that force this torturous existence on the people they imagine they love. When Prince William was a young man, he would occasionally tell photographers waiting for him everywhere he went, “Why can’t you just let me be normal?”

There was a sharp counterargument. He could walk away any time he likes, but chooses not to. The new King and Queen of Netflix have made a different decision, doing their own thing, telling their own story, and above all – making their own cash.

You don’t have to like either or them, or be interested in a single word they have to say, to at least wonder why they’re doing what they’re doing – and whether it might not all be their own fault.