Paul Burrell, a k a Diana's Rock, provides just the right start tonight on 20/20 to one of those strange and heightened weeks of "sweeps" television in which prime-time programming careens between debased and profound until you almost can't tell which is which.
Burrell, the 44-year-old butler to the late Princess of Wales, acknowledges sneaking people into Kensington Palace to be "with Diana," as well as confirming the report of a homosexual rape involving a palace aide and a royal coverup of the attack, in excerpts of his interview with Elizabeth Vargas made available by ABC News yesterday. Little or none of what he says in the excerpts hasn't been already said on the other side of the Atlantic, but so what?
This isn't about news. This is about hype and seeing the man so slavishly devoted to Diana that he washed her undergarments by hand because he was afraid someone would steal them if they were sent to a laundry talk about their relationship.
This is about intimacy, power, social class, confidences whispered and secrets told in one of those intensely weird relationships for which Diana seemed to be a magnet.
ABC News' 20/20 snagged the interview in part through the purchase of U.S. broadcast rights of Diana's Rock, a British documentary and interview with Burrell by a Brit journalist, for a reported $350,000 last week. Burrell had already sold a print version of his story to the Daily Mirror, a London tabloid, for $620,000.
The butler and the documentary became a fairly hot property as one bizarre revelation after another about Diana and life with the Royals came out in recent weeks in connection with Burrell's trial for allegedly stealing more than 300 of Diana's personal belongings after her death. CBS and NBC were also in the bidding.
Burrell was acquitted earlier this month when the prosecution dropped charges against him after Queen Elizabeth II intervened saying she suddenly remembered Burrell's telling her after Diana's death in 1997 that he was going to hold some of Diana's things for safekeeping. The recollection came to the queen after the British press ran wild with two headline grabbing bits of information that came out in connection with Burrell's trial.
The first involved his saying that the queen had told him to "watch his back," because there are forces in England that no one understands. The second involved allegations that an aide to Prince Charles had raped another servant in 1989 and then tried to assault the man again in 1995, and that Charles covered it up. Burrell came into that picture when Diana allegedly taped the victim's account of the attack and locked it in a box that she gave to Burrell to hold.
Burrell confirms the audio tape in tonight's interview, saying he knows what is on it, but has never actually listened to it. In answer to Vargas' asking him why neither he nor Diana reported the assault to police, Burrell says, "I think she tried to help the victim so much, tried to help him recover from his ordeal. He didn't want it to become a police issue ... "
Burrell, married and the father of two children, waffled when asked if he had homosexual encounters at the palace: "So many things happened in my private life. In the last 30 years, a lot of things have happened to me. I've no wish to discuss my private life, as I've no wish to discuss the princess' private life."
As to what might have happened if Diana had not been killed in the Paris car crash, Burrell says he believes she would be married and living in Malibu, Calif. - that was the plan.
"There were actually plans to move there," he says.
Diana in La-La Land.
And, if that isn't enough prime-time strangeness, later tonight on CSI: Miami you can catch an episode in which a serial sniper starts killing people at random, and it is up to David Caruso to stop the killing. Five people die before he does.
Of course, tonight's episode of the hit CBS drama was in production before the real serial sniping took place in Maryland and Virginia last month. But this is the start of that very real nightmare being told back to us as a narrative of entertainment.
Wednesday night, sexual fantasy is the coin of the television realm when CBS presents Victoria's Secret Fashion Show at 8, followed the finale of The Bachelor on ABC at 9. The latter is what network TV likes to refer to as a "relationship show" - you know, like the thing Diana and Burrell had.
Who know, maybe by Friday we'll be at war, and prime-time network television can really go nuts.