Historical Notes: `The whole thing was grossly overdone'

A NATION united in grief? Not according to several surveys of reactions to Diana's death.

The British Film Institute asked nearly 500 viewers to record their personal responses to the television coverage of the mourning. Although 61 per cent watched the funeral, 50 per cent declared themselves not profoundly affected by the death and nearly 40 per cent complained that the coverage was excessive in extent or sentiment. A 77-year-old woman from Yorkshire said of the mourning that "the whole thing was grossly overdone". Her indignation echoes the viewers' revolt which restored ordinary programming to BBC2 on the first Sunday afternoon after Diana's death and the condemnation of its saturation coverage voiced by 98 per cent of those contacting Radio 4's Feedback. How do these statistics compute with the better-known figures of the Floral Revolution - more than a million people gathering in Central London to watch the funeral cortege; 290,000 queuing to sign 43 books of condolence; pounds 30m worth of flowers laid across Britain?

Soon after Diana's death a number of commentators began to register doubts about Tony Blair's prediction that "the whole of our country, all of us, will be in a state of shock and mourning". Were the people queuing in the palace gardens truly grieving for someone they hadn't known or seeking to play their own part in a historic occasion? There was a metropolitan focus to the mourning, with the Queen being summoned back from Scotland to "her people" in the Home Counties. In contrast to the multi-cultural impression of the crowds conveyed by television interviews, the Observer counted a surprising number of Tory tabloid readers in the Mall. Others registered the unsurprising presence, in central London at summer's end, of large numbers of international tourists.

So who were the people for whom Diana was the People's Princess? As early as the second week after Diana "the people" began to appear in quotation marks. Indeed, on the day before the funeral, the Times's John Lloyd warned that in the People capitalised lay worrying reminders of a People's Democracy. Several feminist columnists interpreted the reactions to Diana's death as a popular revolt against both monarchy and sexism, while other feminists vigorously disagreed.

Meanwhile, neither monarchy nor sexism seemed in abatement, with post- Diana polls showing increased numbers predicting the crown's continuance into the next century. Yet here too "the people" seemed united only in despair, with one focus group as unenthusiastic about what was by then universally termed "the nation's longest-running soap" as they were pessimistic about its cancellation. As New Labour attempted to appropriate Diana's popularity to its own rule over New Britain, Peter Mandelson invoked the responses to her death on behalf of a nation reunited, beneath the canopy of the Millennium Dome:

People feel atomised, fragmented and set apart from one another. They feel that the community spirit of the country has gone, diminished in recent years. The celebrations will enable people to come together to share something: something people felt in the wake of Diana's death . . . I'm not suggesting the Dome will start us on a more upward course - but it might help.

Critics of this medieval monument to a mythical history on the site of an imperial timeline have noted that pounds 758m could have built four major hospitals, wired up every school to the Internet or financed the threatened arts budget for the next four years. Or, one might add, paid for the monarchy for the next nine. Fittingly, the Dome's design is strikingly coronal. And, as with the real crown, "the people" will bear the brunt of its costs. All in the name of a nation united.

Mandy Merck is the editor of `After Diana: irreverent elegies', published tomorrow (Verso, pounds 10)