Charles: The Private Man, the Public Role

The programme was two and half hours in duration and featured several interviews with Charles. The programme was broadcast to mark the 25th anniversary of Charles's investiture as Prince of Wales. Film production took 18 months, and 180 hours of footage was shot. The remaining footage is believed to be stored at Windsor Castle. Dimbleby said of his documentary that "While I had no reason to feel any hostility towards the Prince, I did not want to be in a position of painting a glossy portrait". The film shows Charles on his official visits to Mexico, the Middle East, Australia, and various countries in Europe. Charles is interviewed about his children, Prince William and Prince Harry, and the failure of his marriage to their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. Charles also argued that Britain should reintroduce a form of national service for young people and foreign governments should contribute to the financial upkeep for British military interventions in their countries when it was part of an international effort. Dimbleby referred to reports in tabloid newspapers regarding Charles's personal life and asked him if he had tried to be "faithful and honourable" to his wife, to which Charles replied "Yes, absolutely". Dimbleby asked him if he had been faithful to her and Charles replied "Yes[...] Until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried". Charles had referred to Camilla as a "dear friend" and "a great friend of mine" but described her as only one of "a large number of friends". Camilla and her husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, divorced in January 1995. ==Reception and aftermath==

Dimbleby's biography of Charles, The Prince of Wales: A Biography was published in November 1994. William Rees-Mogg wrote in The Times that the documentary was "part of a public relations exercise" that had been planned "to restore [Charles's] image" and compared it to previous examples of British royal "public relations" including Edward III's foundation of the Order of the Garter and Henry VIII's Field of the Cloth of Gold. Peter Waymark wrote in The Times that the programme "fills two-and-a-half hours of peak screentime and should go far to meet complaints that he [Charles] is not given fair treatment by the media". The film was seen as an attempt by supporters of Charles to redress the media coverage garnered by Diana in the previous decade; Steve Coll wrote in The Washington Post that "the prince has been overshadowed by Diana's global charisma and more recently has been victimized, at least in the view of the Charles camp, by systematic leaks to the media that she authorized" and that the film was "the prince's calculated attempt to match Diana at her own media game". Two-thirds of respondents to a telephone poll conducted by The Sun believed Charles "unfit to be king" in the aftermath of the interview. In his column for The Times, Matthew Parris wrote in June 1994 that Dimbleby "struck a small but welcome blow for civilised television discourse" feeling that "It was not a matter of extracting or bludgeoning opinions from [Charles]. As a result, Dimbleby was able to adopt the role of midwife to a natural birth, rather than surgeon in a Caesarean section" and "It was clear that Dimbleby had accompanied the Prince almost everywhere for a very long period. They must have had innumerable chats, some private, some recorded. Different "interviews" appeared to have taken place at very different times and in different circumstances. So what we got was a developing conversation between two men. The fear and tension, the urgency and artificiality which often produce "news" but so seldom enhance understanding or sympathy, were absent". Dimbleby was a "...softman extraordinaire. He was never rude, never insistent. His questions were never tendentious. Only with the utmost gentleness did he lead his witness". ==See also==