Some people think Meghan Markle is a self-serving minx who married into royalty as a game plan. Others are less kind. I liked Meg when she started dating Prince Harry and hoped the Markle Sparkle would brighten up our lives. The American actress, best known then for playing Rachel Zane in legal drama Suits, seemed like a breath of fresh air. But as Meghan Duchess For Sale? reminded us the fairy tale quickly turned Grimm. Less than two years after their 2020 wedding, the couple stepped away from royal duties and decamped to California. The following March, they starred in a heavily choreographed interview with Oprah Winfrey where Harry’s Cinderella put the boot in. Meghan’s “truth” clashed with reality at least five times, but her claims of royal racism – saying one relative was “concerned” about unborn baby Archie’s skin colour – were swallowed whole by the twitterati. (And laughed off by US comedian Chris Rock: “That’s not racist – even black people want to know how brown the baby is going to be.”) The Channel 5 show, replete with royal reporters, spent too long relating the recent and familiar backstory before detailing the Sussexes’ various attempts to cash in on their semi-royal status. Their eye-watering £112million deal with Netflix under-delivered. Their first show, Harry & Meghan, did relatively well, but Polo and Heart Of Invictus were ratings flops. Their Spotify podcast deal failed to recover the £15m advance – one exec branded them “grifters” (con artists) and mocked the paucity of their podcast ideas. Harry’s ghost-written memoir Spare fared better. But now Meg is at the forefront of their enterprises. Her latest solo Netflix series, the toe-curling With Love, Meghan, set in a pretend “home”, sees her “falling in love” with a raw turnip, talking to cakes and jarring preserves – now sold in her pricey As Ever range (£21 for a jar of honey!). Every episode finds friends telling her how wonderful she is – just like on Harry & Meghan where pals effusively praised her acting, empathy, and activism. “She’s fed through service,” claimed one. But is she? In With Love, we see Cinders telling a friend her surname is Sussex and calling herself HRH. So while shirking the duties that go with royalty, and denouncing the in-laws, she is happy to cash in on it. It’s always been about Meghan. Her family, his family – give her a bridge and she will burn it. But although she clearly lacks substance, Meg is successfully building her brand. She’s the smiling face of vacuous celebrity. A triumph of ambition over talent, while poor Hal looks increasing like the poster boy for Stockholm Syndrome.
In contrast to this non-stop ego-show, the BBC’s Live Aid At 40 mini-series featured talented stars using their deserved fame to alleviate suffering. Band Aid’s story began with Michael Buerk’s BBC grimly poetic news report from the Horn Of Africa in October 1984: “Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th century…”
Heart-breaking images of emaciated children, too weak and exhausted to wave flies off their faces, galvanised Geldof into action. Within days, the Boomtown Rats singer had assembled a stellar cast to record the Band Aid single. He then masterminded Live Aid, an even more star-studied concert running simultaneously in London and Philadelphia – an incredible feat of organisation, courtesy Harvey Weinstein. Can-do Geldof, looking like a lost, mad tramp priest from Father Ted, was honest, articulate, and passionate, batting off naysayers and critics. A tad more impressive than some fake modern-day ‘rebel’ posing in a tricolour tea cosy. Bono was as pompous as ever. Hilariously he moaned about his Live Aid mullet, while sporting something similar and banging on about colonialism. Ethiopia was never colonised by a European power. We could have had more on how the country’s Marxist state, led by the Derg regime, presided over years of economic collapse, forced collectivization, and civil war – deliberately causing the famine by bombing markets and trade convoys. Later, Bob, acknowledged the regime had misused and misappropriated aid. Still, Band Aid was a force for altruistic good, not ego, and the footage was a nostalgic joy. All those dead legends – Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Harry Belafonte, George Michael – in action. The only technical cock-up was Paul McCartney’s conked-out mic – incredible considering 40 years later Wimbledon can’t even get its electronic line-calling system to work.
Those unimpressed with TV’s sporting overload can seek refuge in the safe haven of the streamers. Netflix’s The Waterfront is Dawson’s Creek meets Breaking Bad. It has all the soap staples, infidelity, secrets, lies and surprise love-children, plus drug-running and murder. Think Dallas-on-sea, with oil replaced by fish and narcotics. And Bosch fans will lap up spin-off Ballard (Prime) with Designated Survivor’s Maggie Q as LAPD detective Renee Ballard. Elsewhere Noel Edmonds has gone full Alan Partridge in his Kiwi Adventure and eco-doom hit new heights on BBC2’s Heatwaves: The New Normal? where an alarmist weather map turned redder than Meghan’s raspberry jam. 30C (86F)? We used to call that summer.