Is Meghan Markle a bully or was she bullied, silent or silenced, as Oprah Winfrey says in the provocative promo for her interview with the Sussexes which airs on Sunday night in the United States.
By the time we see it on Network Ten, on Monday at 8pm, we’ll likely have the best lines memorised from the few minutes of reality TV, which will be stretched into two hours of viewing with ad breaks and dramatic reveals. Not since Princess Diana’s explosive 1995 BBC Panorama interview has so much been said about so little.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex in their interview.
Already in the lead-up to the interview about why the Duke and Duchess of Sussex left the royal family, it’s been a “Bridgerton-esque”, pistols-at-dawn-style showdown between two of the biggest and best-oiled media machines in the world. In one corner we have the house of Hollywood, with the glitz of Oprah and her entourage, and in the other the regal refinement of Buckingham Palace’s “The Firm” . The gloves are well and truly off.
From writing about her miscarriage, to speaking out about her in-laws, Markle is utterly North American in the way she “shares” her life on social media and now on TV with Oprah, in contrast to the royal family, which is so utterly “stiff upper lip” British.
It’s a Wimbledon-like contest, shots volleyed back and forth across the Atlantic between the teams behind the Los Angeles-born actress and the family that the London-born Prince Harry left behind. It is like the war between the West Side Story gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, or the Capulets versus the Montague’s in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but with a touch of the all-guns-blazing Americana of the Hatfields against the McCoys. It’s families and countries, not understanding and not respecting their differences.
Put aside the wealth, glamour and nice clothes, who would want to be in Meghan Markle’s expensive designer-made shoes? As one who followed her every elegant step back in 2018 on her first Australian royal tour with Prince Harry, not me.
Up close, you can see the freckles when Meghan Markle scrunches up her ski-jump nose in delight, which she did often on that Australian tour. To me she seemed sincere in her interactions with the public. The then young newlyweds went out of their way to meet mental health charities: from sitting on Bondi Beach in an “anti-negative vibes circle” to Dubbo, where Prince Harry spoke honestly and heartbreakingly about his own struggles with mental health.
When they were the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, meeting their namesakes Harry and Meghan at Taronga Zoo in 2018.
Markle’s effort at baking chocolate-chip banana cake, with a touch of – bien sur – ginger, wowed the folks at the Wongarbon Country Women’s Association, just out of Dubbo, and she and Harry broke protocol to hug crowd members, from war widow Daphne Dunne, 98, to Luke Vincent, 5, a boy with Down Syndrome who pulled the royal beard.
