Thinking of Diana since Crown 6

[Sowhatsnext123]

Anyone else? I absolutely LOVE the crown. Mainly because of the powerful, haunting music. But since watching it this evening I feel really sad and nostalgic. I was only 13 when my mum woke me up crying. I remember it was thundering where I was the day after Diana died and it just felt so eerie. I didn't really like her when I was a kid because my Dad and Nan thought she was too rebellious and so I assumed the same but I was gutted when she died and so were they, as if they were sorry. I remember thinking well she was 37 she was quite old anyway! I'm now 2 years older than she was. She was far from perfect but she was such fun, such a lovely young woman. Thinking about her a lot tonight and her poor boys. I do wonder where she would be today had she lived. I don't think for a second she'd have been with Dodi for very long.

So, I came in from a night out and remember watching the accident reporting on the news. My memory is that I saw the newsreader announcing that she had died…it was very shocking. Now, I think how young she was.

OMG me too. Far more than I do Diana, if the truth be told.

Totally agree
Deflection from the media
Impact on her children.

I don't agree with many of the things the total family have done, or Harry. But the consequences of having to deal with their grief in public will be so far reaching in all their lives

Bloody press

And to me this series is part of it. Refuse to watch

There were plenty people in the UK who couldn't have cared less either.

We came home from clubbing a bit worse for drink, put the TV on, saw the headlines, shrugged, turned the TV off and went to bed.

The histrionics, media fawning, and competitive grieving in the aftermath were as ridiculous as they were predictable, and while I did feel sympathy for her children and family, it did get a bit irritating constantly being told what "the British people" thought and felt, as if we are one hive-mind, or it was impossible to believe Diana was anything other than some sort of semi-deity.

I'd happily guillotine the whole bleedin' lot of the parasites tomorrow, so no, I can't comprehend at all the folk wailing and bawling in the streets, in bits over some privileged layabout they'd never met, but we're a bizarre and ridiculous nation for the most part when it comes to how we grovel to and consider ourselves beneath a family of toffs just because one of them occasionally wears a magic hat, so I suppose bizarre behaviours and people making fools of themselves is par for the course when it comes to the royal family. Not that she was even a royal at the time...

I don't know anyone who cried over Diana. I know lots of people who found the public drama about it quite bizarre. It was a breakfast table conversation in our house - I was 17- on the day she died and that was it. I remember watching the news during the week and reading the paper. I watched the funeral with my mam and grandma but we didn't cry. It was for the spectacle really.
I'm not sure if it was because Newcastle is quite remote from London. We were at my grandma's at a village called Newbrough outside of Haydon Bridge the day of the funeral- even more remote. We watched it, chatted about it while we had lunch and then me and my mam went home to Newcastle. I do recall wailing women in the crowds on the Mall as the coffin passed and feeling it was totally over the top and rather vulgar.
I don't understand the obsession with it. I like The Crown but this season is just boring- it's all been in other tv dramas.

She was not a victim, in my opinion. She was an architect in her own unhappiness and would have been unhappy whoever she married. She was insecure, attention-seeking and a martyr. Charles was as much to blame.
She's long dead and as Shakespeare says 'What's past help should be past grief'.

I wonder what she would have become if she hadn’t died. Don’t have a very good feeling about it.

Suspect the press would have turned against her, which was just starting the month she was killed. She’d have got more needy, more nasty and less royal very fast.

Her best bet was marriage to an American billionaire of her choice, but that wouldn’t have lasted. Five weddings later she’d have done Playboy for attention.

That week remains the most surreal week I've ever experienced. It was like everything stopped (tv shows, news channels, newspapers...all were on one person) and the public was genuinely traumatized.

Forget Beatlemania, the reaction to her death is unlike any form of collective mania that has ever happened here.

It occurs in North Korea whenever their dictators die and the crowd (with an invisible gun to their head) pour out into the streets and "cry" over the loss of "dear leader"... but given this is fake it doesn't compare to the Diana reaction.

That kind of reaction to Diana can never happen again because the news/media is much more fragmented now than it was then when she completely dominated the spotlight. If she was around now she'd get maybe 20% of what she once did as the attention to public figures is much more spread out with so many media outlets and options now. It's why I have to laugh at the Taylor Swift wikipedia article which states she "dominates cultural conversations".. the girl doesn't get 10% of the attention of what the Spice Girls got. Nobody can now.

I remember crying in the shower about her. Not because I was fond of her, but because Harry was the same age that I was when my father died suddenly and I felt so terribly sorry for him. I was 22 and it made me realise how that event had defined my life - I felt I had never got over it, and still do to a certain extent - and I kept thinking about what a long and difficult road that boy now faced.

Now he just pisses me off and I want to tell him to stop moaning and pull himself together, but at the time I was genuinely moved for both boys.

I think people had a genuine emotional reaction - just as they had a genuine reaction to the Queen’s death, but Diana’s death was far more shocking.

But I also remember sitting on a tube reading a paper and feeling so cross at the demands that the family should come to London.

It was so surreal watching the hysteria of it all from outside the UK. It was in the press here, but it just seemed completely out of proportion in the UK press. They whipped up a frenzy. I felt sorry for the princes, but the public went a bit mad, it seemed like.

I sort of feel the same in that watching those scenes brought back a lot of memories of that time. People did go a bit bonkers but when you actually think about it it is almost unbelievable that it happened. The most photographed woman in the world dies tragically in a car accident. I think it was just a huge shock. And yes I know people die every day but Diana was on another scale in terms of impact/ coverage. I felt so sad for William & Harry watching it. I do wonder how things would have turned out for her if she’d lived. Would she still be dominating the headlines?

Yeah the fact Diana was in her prime made it all the more shocking. The last celebrity death in their prime that I can think of was Amy Winehouse...remember seeing her name on teletext (Aertel in Ireland), Amy Winehouse dead, and being completely stunned.

I think Diana might have found her way if she’d lived. She’d have probably become a UN Goodwill Ambassador or similar, a global non political charity role with a bit of international travel that fit around her love of glamorous holidays. Remarried to new money not old, a tech billionaire or something? Charles and Camilla wouldn’t have had as easy a time of it. But Harry’s life path may have been quite different.

I remember getting up in the morning and my sister telling me she had died, and I couldn't believe it. TV programmes were cancelled and the radio cancelled their normal programming and just played soft, classical music for at least a day, maybe more. I recall someone commenting there would be no more fun for William and Harry now she's gone, they wont be going to theme parks.

I don't know what to believe with the Crown, such as did she really not want to be in Paris, did he propose to her.

Of course no one knows what is said between two people and I guess they are making a story around events.

One of DM’s work colleagues took two months off “because her faith in humanity had been shaken”. By the fact of Di’s death followed by Mother Teresa’s death, not the paparazzi actions or excessive mourning.

Her faith in humanity must have been pretty tenuous in the first place quite honestly.

I was working overseas, six months pregnant and had been obsessed with Diana from an 11 year old and she married Charles in the same year my sister got married. I certainly didn't cry but I was truly shocked and can remember exactly where I was when I was told, as most people I suppose can. I had scrapbooks as a teenager devoted to her.

We only had US news which informed us that Diana was more American at heart than British. That annoyed me.

At work on the Monday, I was asked several times if the baby was a girl, would I call her Diana. Hardly!!! The baby was a girl though. If I had been thinking of Diana, that would have put me right off. I do always think of her on August 31st.

This didn't shock me at all

I was 7 months pregnant with my first DC. I remember waking up ad turning on the tv and watching coverage of people laying flowers at Kensington Palace. My initial thought was the QM had died, then Princess Margaret as they were at KP.

I remember watching the coverage for most of the day. The week after was very strange. The country collectively went a bit nuts.

I’m pretty much the same age as Prince William give or take a month or two. I think I just recall the overall shock and everyone in the family talking about how the Queen will handle the situation. I still remember the boys at the funeral and I remember then thinking this is too much to handle for them.

I remember it well and getting increasingly incredulous at the hysteria and completely OTT reactions of so many people.
one person I knew drove 250 miles each way to London to see the flowers four times. Their weeping and wailing finished our friendship.
The whole thing became more and more unreal and distasteful.

😀😀

I remember walking downstairs being told and going "oh well" and going up for a shower. I found the whole thing totally bizarre (almost as bizarre as walking one way round a supermarket during covid).

I felt sorry for her family like I would with anyone who died unexpectedly but I will never understand why some people think they have more right than the family to grieve.

I wasn't ever that into her, but her death was a shock and culturally significant. My experience of gearing about her death though was how it weirdly sparked a mini argument with my husband. I'd got up early for a first day at uni, heard the news, told my dh and he flatly denied it. Most bizarre.

Absolutely spot on. I was 18 and I remember being cross at the queen and believing that she should have come back to London.
Now I'm older and a mother myself, I understand why she stayed up at Balmoral and think she was doing the right thing.
The press were awful.

I was in Ireland and watched the Bashir interview and we discussed it in English class the next day! Also started uni in 1997!

I woke to the news on the radio thar Sunday morning and went to tell my Dad who had already heard and nodded solemnly. I remember watching them bring her coffin off the plane on telly later at a friend's house. Lots of talk of decorum from the commentators. Her funeral was the morning after my 'Debs'.