I eventually switched off, but I watched a good slice of ITV's The Duchess in Hull last night. As with all of these formulaic class divide programmes (like Wife Swap) it was excruciating and exploitative, so I gave up soon after the former Sarah Ferguson bounced into a council house and began to dish out unwanted and simplistic advice to the largely overweight Sargerson family.
By then I had seen and heard enough of a woman who just a couple of mornings before had attacked the media for its obsession with the weight of one of her daughters. It has been years since we have heard much about a woman who has been earning a fortune in the States by trading on her title through, wouldn't you just know it, talking about how to shed pounds with Weight Watchers.
While I have some sympathy - well, just a little - for Princess Beatrice, I think it's a bit rich of her mother to defend her while herself taking part in an embarrassing publicity stunt that allows her to thumb her nose at the expense of a specially selected obese underclass family.
(By the way, as Nancy Banks-Smith points out in her excellent TV review, when it comes to embarrassing her children, it's difficult to beat the revelation in a speech she made to the school of her other daughter that 82% of a newspaper's readers had once voted they would rather sleep with a goat than the Duchess. Again, my sympathies were with Princess Eugenie as she squirmed in her seat).
Anyway, the point is that however cruel it might to subject a 19-year-old woman to comments about her body shape - as Allison Pearson did in her Daily Mail column - a princess who is fifth in line to the throne (amazing, I know) cannot escape the relentless media spotlight.
Note the sentence in Pearson's item that has not been widely quoted: "I fear that Bea is in danger of combining her mother's toe-curling excesses with her dad's physique." A bit below the belt, but the daughters of a mother who is a media creature, and who makes a habit of making a fool of herself, have to live with the consequences. Their birthright gives them special privileges and they have few rights to complain.
It's a reminder that modern members of an extended, and largely unwanted, royal family must expect media scrutiny (see my comment is free posting today for more on that topic).
Finally, to illustrate another of the Duchess's unlovable features - her ego - she assured the British people at one point: "I haven't forgotten you." Fergie, you just don't get it, do you? We don't care whether you have, or haven't, forgotten us. We would like to forget you. As, surely, will the Sargerson family.
