'Exploitative' TV opera angers friends

A TV opera about Princess Diana's death to be broadcast tonight on Channel 4 has attracted bitter criticism from her friends and supporters.

When She Died: Death of a Princess, with music by Jonathan Dove and a libretto by David Harsent, takes six characters through the days from the fatal crash in Paris to her funeral. Each sings about his or her grief and the opera ends with a big choral scene in the streets that led to her final resting place at Althorp. Filmed in and around London, the drama is interwoven with actual television footage from Diana's life. It recreates the amazing outpouring of grief in Kensington Gardens.

Lord St John of Fawsley, a close friend of Diana, yesterday criticised the opera as "being quite appalling and in the most dreadful taste". Other friends condemned the programme as "disgusting" and "exploitative" at a sensitive time for her sons.

They are particularly disturbed by a scene in which a Diana fanatic hires a prostitute to impersonate the princess, take off her clothes, and lie naked between four candles.

London-born composer Dove, 43, defended his work yesterday, saying: "It was the response of people who turned out in Kensington Gardens which really intrigued me. That's what I wanted to express. I realised I could write a huge lament for them to sing, and that appealed. I've always had an interest in finding the operatic in everyday occurrences. Not that the death of Diana was in any sense ordinary, of course.

"The reason this is such a potent idea for television is that for most of us it's the medium that linked us to the entire affair. So the opera starts, quite simply, with people switching on their screens."

Mr Dove has produced previous works based on true events. Flight was about an asylum seeker who lived in a Paris airport for a year. Written for Glyndebourne Touring Opera, it won acclaim.

The £500,000 opera is the biggest televisual drama about the princess since the 1993 mini-series Diana: Her True Story. Based on Andrew Morton's book of the same name, the £4m production was originally made for American TV company NBC. When it was screened on Sky TV, British audiences scorned the series.

'When She Died: Death of a Princess', Channel 4 tonight at 9pm