The Interview and its Intertexts: Staging Princess Diana in a Mediatized Age

The 1995 BBC interview with Princess Diana, on its flagship current affairs programme Panorama, is one of the most famous events in television history. It has since become infamous with the publication of the Dyson Report in 2021 and the BBC’s acknowledgement that the reporter Martin Bashir used deception to secure the interview. Recordings of the Panorama programme, and all programmes featuring Bashir, have since been erased from the BBC’s platforms. This article takes a stage drama about these events, The Interview by Jonathan Maitland, as a case study, a ‘problem play’ that requires us to rethink the usually discrete categories of adaptation, documentary drama, history play, and factual and fictional writing. The article draws on Eckart Voigts’s concept of recombinant appropriation in order to understand how the stage play borrows from previous and recurring representations of the Princess. It then uses Seda Ilter’s idea of mediatized dramaturgy to question how far The Interview explores the cultural implications of this dense intertextual network. Finally, the article argues more generally for an account of intermedial adaptation that works across both spatial and temporal dimensions. The decentred, multidirectional ‘rhizomatic’ or ‘archontic’ webs of adaptational relationships need to be complemented by multiple chronologies for us to be able to read adaptations in their cultural moment.