ROLAND WHITE reviews weekend’s TV: Aristo rules – adultery is fine as long as you dally with a duke 

Diana: Curse of the Spencers

Rating: ****

Young, Black and Right (C4)

Rating: ***

When the Royals are furious with The Crown, they’ve watched Diana: Curse Of The Spencers (C5) from behind the couch in horror.

This account of family life between the Windsors and the Spencers reminded us that Prince Charles greeted the birth of Prince Harry with the somber remark, “Oh, it’s a boy.” Then he left to play polo.

Princess Diana’s story has been widely screened on TV screens this week, with the release of Diana: Curse Of The Spencers (C5) and Netflix’s The Crown.

Charles later told his mother-in-law, Frances Shand Kydd, that he had wanted a girl. No wonder Harry’s relationship with the rest of the family is a little strained.

It got worse. Royal biographer Andrew Morton, speaking of the breakdown of Charles and Diana’s marriage, said: ‘When I asked Diana where it all went wrong, she always pointed to the birth of Prince Harry.’

Can anything be more hurtful than that word ‘always’?

The alleged curse appears to have been inflicted on his descendants by the 7th Earl Spencer, Diana’s grandfather.

His son, Johnnie, was one of the most desirable young men in the country when he fell in love with Anne Coke, daughter of the Earl of Leicester and now better known as Lady Anne Glenconner.

But Johnnie’s father believed there was madness in Lady Anne’s family and forbade the marriage. She realized something was wrong when her fiancé didn’t show up at Ascot.

Johnnie was then maneuvered into marrying Frances Roche by her mother, lady-in-waiting Lady Fermoy.

They had a miserable time, with Frances under pressure to get a male heir after three girls. After finally having a boy, she left Johnnie for wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd.

Defamed in aristocratic circles as an adulteress, she fled with Peter to a small Scottish island.

Could Frances have avoided exile by choosing wiser? “If you’d run off with a duke,” her mother explained, “it would have been good.” What a rule that would have made in The Crown.

Here are some ideas you don’t often hear on Channel 4: there are too many absent fathers in the black community, and some black people don’t work hard enough.

These are the views of Hannah of Richmond, the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, as explained in Young, Black and Right-Wing (C4).

Zeze Mills follows the stories of black people who are politically oriented to the right in Young, Black and Right-Wing (C4)

Presenter Zeze Millz questioned why black people should vote Labour, and met black youth who believe in free markets and immigration controls, and who like Jacob Rees-Mogg.

TV pundit Dominique Samuels said class was more important than race: “It’s intellectually lazy to say this person doesn’t succeed because they’re black.”

All this may have been very revealing a few years ago, but now that we have Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor and James Cleverly is our Secretary of State, it came as no surprise.

Perhaps the highlight of the program was this slightly eccentric piece of political analysis by Millz, talking to Labor MP Dawn Butler about voters’ choice. “It’s like a boyfriend, a bad boyfriend,” Millz said, but she didn’t use the word bullshit.

“You actually have two bad friends, but because you’re with the bad boy, the other can come and sell your dreams.”

‘Labour is more like an ex-boyfriend who treated you well,’ the MP replied solemnly, ‘but you didn’t appreciate it at all.’

Next stop, Newsnight.