"Heart of Invictus" documentary series, streaming 30 August 2023

[MrsMaxDeWinter]

The trailer for 'Heart of Invictus" has been released by Netflix, and it looks incredible, and so moving.

For those interested, please find it here.

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And I apologise for my muddly post! Sometimes my fingers run away with me and there's no excuse now we have an edit button!

Quite. I don’t see how any of that is anyone’s concern.

it’s a hard place to be, you have to keep yourself out there but then many people are vitrolic about you. The day that stops however is the day that you have no more way of making money. It’s tough. It will die down. If there is no rapprochement then kids Lilibets age wont even know that King William had a brother.

How old is George? How long before he gets drunk in a field or gets a girlfriend/boyfriend? The wheel turns round again. Would have happened if they stayed royal too only they would have been financially secure.

Lots of the royals were good parents. All the kids grandchildren had excellent parents all except William and Harry. That William seems publicly put together is a miracle. Who knows how much of a other surrogate his wife is in private.

Mother surrogate.

It was charged to Netflix, not Invictus (as some claimed) but it still generated negative comments for its extravagance.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

That article from Jennie Bond is interesting. Fair and measured I would say. She was a RR so it's a reasonable take from her.

I never thought KC sounded that bad. I mean, he seems like a bit of a workaholic and delegated a lot to nannies and matrons… but having nannies and good schools are still enormous privileges, not abuse. And it’s really impossible to take the pain away of losing the other parent. There’s a common phenomenon where the deceased parent gets lionised whereas the living parent can’t do right for doing wrong. It’s not a great situation and there are no right answers, but it seemed he did his best.

The RR are generally balanced. And fair in what they actually say. A lot of the white noise did not, and never did, come from them. They made valid criticisms.

Harry though himself says that it was not Afghanistan that wounded him. It was his childhood of losing his mother. To say that is a "wounded soldier" is a bit of a slight on soldiers who were really wounded by the war.

There’s a good conversation on LBC at the moment.

Harry is the lynchpin of the series not only because he founded the Games nine years ago, but because his army service made him realise that he, too, is a wounded soldier.

Jennie Bond has always been measured- she is less obsequious than, say Nicholas Witchell, however she has mostly been balanced.

I think he did too. A lot of the damage was done in what was their disgusting marriage and divorce and the role of the media in that. I still can’t get over the fact that people thought how violating the media was was validated. I can’t believe that peoples first thought when D and C went on TV to give interviews that people didn’t say: what are you doing to your children. The death of Diana was horrendous, not helped by a ravenous and entitled public. Charles did his best in the years after. He did his best and their life was far more stable. A lot of the damage was done in those ages to 7 though.

He says that coming home from Afghanistan is what triggered all of the feelings from 1997. But yeah the Diana bits (and there aren’t many to be fair) did seem a bit out of place. It wasn’t really necessary for the documentary, viewers wouldn’t have missed them if they’d been edited out.

A friend of Diana's said she was talking before she died about how she wanted to make a documentary or programme about causes that were important every few years. I think that is also part of why Harry is participating in making these shows.

Yeah the divorce being so acrimonious probably didn’t help their relationship with KC after she died either. She became a saint and he was her primary antagonist. I think he did the best with the situation he had.

I also think William was somewhat protected in the years since by having a more accurate viewpoint of his mother while still obviously loving her. He was parentified by her and he has obviously done the work, with or without professional help, in dealing with that. Diana herself had a dreadful childhood and this things become generational trauma. William at least seems to have broken the cycle.

I'm afraid I don't agree, given that 4 of them spent 40 minutes criticising the OW interview in an online talk before it had been released. that wasn't fair. They were caught out and shown up

Google Balham donkey sanctuary!

@Serenster

Well said

They weren’t really official RR. Whatever they claim There are really only 7 networks/papers. BBC/ITV/Times/Telegraph/Sun/Mail/Mirror\Sky/standard obviously PA and the photographers. Maybe that’s more then 7 but certainly not Dickie Arbiter and daughter who were doing that I think.

Harry though himself says that it was not Afghanistan that wounded him. It was his childhood of losing his mother. To say that is a "wounded soldier" is a bit of a slight on soldiers who were really wounded by the war.

Gabe, a veteran who lost his arm from a motorbike accident shares a lot about his childhood trauma. One of the vets from Canada says he finds it hard to hug people because he was never hugged. Another talks about wanting to be a better parent than his parents were. None of the Danish Veterans had physical wounds but all had mental wounds.

There was a point made in the documentary that those with childhood trauma are candidates for ptsd. Sometimes it’s the totality of years of negative experiences , not one incident.

Yes exactly @ALittleTeawithmilk that guy from Canada made me cry, he was so traumatised and to think so much of it was a lifetime of holding it all in. Reminded me of my Dad.

I would look into the research work on risk and resilience especially that coming out of Carolina. That is exactly the effect of.
Cumulative risk factors. Surprisingly the protective factors are on the face of it surprisingly simple. Having one person in your life that provides you with the emotional nourishment you need and helps fight your corner as a child makes all the difference. Of course in reality is spectacularly complex.

@PrincessTigger

I never thought KC sounded that bad. I mean, he seems like a bit of a workaholic and delegated a lot to nannies and matrons… but having nannies and good schools are still enormous privileges, not abuse. And it’s really impossible to take the pain away of losing the other parent.

I was a boarder myself at two schools, I loved one and really suffered at the first. My eyes opened up a lot when I went to a university with a very high proportion of students who came from UK boarding schools. The men in particular were almost all uniformly unhappy. I learned then about "Boarding School Syndrome." There are generations of men for whom boarding school was not a positive experience, and could actually be called abuse, including sexual abuse as we have seen in the historic enquiries. and there are in fact support groups for boarding school survivors.

And the fact that these men tended to go into establishment careers in the UK, army, politics, the church, the professions etc not to mention that, for the earlier generations, colonial administrations recruited from these schools, and the fact that they are at the apex of the class system in the UK --- explains, in my opinion a lot the stunting of natural empathy and compassion in some of the men produced by these schools.

There are fantastic articles on Boarding School Syndrome if you want to read about it.

So no, boarding schools were not always the most nurturing environments, no matter how expensive and a sign of privilege. Rich and privileged children are not immune to emotional trauma.

Sending a 12 year old child back to boarding school after his mother died was extremely cold, especially given how shocking and unexpected Diana's death was. And to not have even arranged specialist bereavement counselling for both children is shocking to me, especially as in those days, boarding school did not focus as much on pastoral care as they thankfully do now. I get that Charles may not be the most emotionally available of fathers, and that's his stuff to deal with, resulting from his own childhood, but it's fine for Harry to look back at his childhood with reflection.

We often say on the Relationships Board on Mumsnet that we look at our childhoods differently after we have had children ourselves, and I am not sure why he alone of all the people in the world should be exempt from that reality.

Will tune into LBC thank you @MissElinorDashwood

And @Roussette I like this recognition from Jenni Bond:

The success of the Games does, though, remind us of what we have lost in this once so popular star of the Royal Family. Despite his grand heritage, Harry has a gift of the common touch: an easy connection with the public, a mischievous sense of humour and a basic likability that’s hard to emulate.

On the sad occasion of the 26th anniversary of his mother's death, it is lovely to see that Diana passed on some of these qualities to her son, even in her absence.

So very well said @MrsMaxDeWinter Absolutely agree that having children makes you reflect and view your own childhood sometimes quite differently or just more deeply than before you had them. Its easy to dismiss things but when you have children you think about how your own experiences impact your parenting and therefore your kids.

I’m not posting this to try and change your mind, Roussette (which won’t happen) but to point out for other people that may not know this that Victoria Arbiter, one of the reporters concerned, has made an interesting video about this experience.

Essentially she agreed to take part in a (completely usual) pre-recorded interview to be aired once the Oprah interview aired, so that the media organisation she believed had commissioned it had relevant snippets ready to go to fill up its programmes once the interview actually aired.

In the same way tv news organisations will keep tapes of tributes to famous people ready to roll out in the event they die (or, old school, newspapers hire staff to compile and keep up to date their obituaries ready to be published at a moment’s notice). Or politicians have two drafts of speeches/press statements prepared - one for a good outcome and one for a bad.

So Victoria gave a pre-recorded interview in which she responded to questions like “Imagine they say X, what’s your comment?” and “imagine they say Y, what’s your comment?” etc. In the expectation that once the real interview aired only those bits that turned out to be relevant would be used. Others in the media industry have confirmed that this is perfectly normal practice.

Anyway the invitation was false, the interview was edited and released as evidence that the participants were being completely dishonest, and Victoria has suffered a great deal of reputational damage. So she told her side of the story on YouTube. It’s interesting.

Yes exactly that guy from Canada made me cry, he was so traumatised and to think so much of it was a lifetime of holding it all in. Reminded me of my Dad.

@Iwantcakeeveryday That’s really sad for your dad, and for you. Sending Hugs to you.

A person doesn’t have to be a Veteran to have experienced these mental health hurdles and I’m reminded that we have at least one Veteran on this board. I hope they are doing okay.