Channel 4 Defiant in Diana Documentary Row

May 29, 11:21 AM

Current Headlines: By MICHAEL SETTLE CHIEF UK POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

CHANNEL 4 chiefs were last night engaged in a stand-off with their critics, refusing to bow to pressure not to use images of a dying Princess Diana in a documentary.

As the Conservatives called for the entire programme to be pulled, the broadcaster, which recently had to apologise over the Big Brother racism row, insisted it had "carefully and sensitively selected"which pictures to use and that in the only one showing the car's occupants the victims had been blacked out.

Accusing the press of "misleading and inaccurate" reporting about the contents of the film, a Channel 4 spokesman said: "These photographs are an important and accurate eyewitness record of how events unfolded after the crash. We acknowledge there is great public sensitivity surrounding pictures of the victims and these have not been included. Some photographs will be of the scene inside the tunnel but in none of the pictures is it possible to identify Diana or indeed any of the crash victims."

He added: "Only one image shows the occupants of the car after the crash and it has been appropriately obscured to avoid any unwarranted intrusion into their privacy or that of their families."

However, this did not wash with Rosa Monckton, one Diana's closest friends, who launched a withering attack on the documentary- makers, accusing them of including ghoulish pictures simply to boost audience ratings.

The fact the images were blurred made no difference, insisted Ms Monckton, "because everybody knows who they are and it's intrusive".

She went on: "The moment of dying should be when you expect the greatest privacy and to intrude on that moment in order to sell a programme is absolutely disgusting."

The programme, Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel, is due to be broadcast on June 6 and reportedly includes the first public airing of images taken by French photographers immediately after the Paris collision in August 1997. The film is said to show one picture of Diana receiving oxygen from a French doctor as she lay slumped in the back of the black Mercedes. Last year, when an Italian magazine published the former picture there was a worldwide outcry led by Princes William and Harry.

They issued an unprecedented statement, saying how publication of the picture had caused them "great hurt" and appealed to other media organisations not to reproduce the image.

Lord Spencer said he was "shocked and sickened" by the broadcast of photographs of his dying sister by CBS, the American TV network.

Rosemary McKenna, the Labour MP for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East, urged Channel 4 "to think very carefully" before airing the programme.

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