Cast your mind back, if you will, to 2005. Michael Jackson found himself charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy at his Neverland ranch, and was tried in the Santa Barbara County Superior Court before the world’s media. The trial was closed to broadcast cameras, so Sky chose to cover the case the next best way, by hiring a Michael Jackson impersonator to wear his silliest wig, put on his silliest voice and read out real-life court transcripts on a nightly reenactment show entitled Michael Jackson Trial.
You might (correctly) remember what an all-out horror show the programme was; a cavalcade of bad wigs, stilted delivery, nightmarish prosthetics and the sort of tinpot production that makes a daytime soap opera look like an Avatar movie. It was bad, gimmicky television, designed for nothing but the worst kind of boggle-eyed rubbernecking, and it was destined never to be repeated.
Until, that is, Prince Harry decided to give evidence at his phone hacking trial. Because, once again, the trial is closed to camera. And – you guessed it – once again Sky has decided to hire a lookalike to read out bits of the transcript on the telly. The resulting show, Harry in Court, debuted on Sky News last night. It is everything you ever thought it would be. And more. And less, for that matter. Put simply, Harry in Court is everything.
Don’t worry your poor sweet head about why it exists. Don’t trouble yourself with the knowledge that there is no reasonable explanation for a show like this in the year 2023, when every smallest subtlety of the trial has already been electronically distributed around the world several times over as soon as it happens. None of it matters. The only truth you need right now is this: you currently share a planet with a wonky televised am-dram Harry courtroom drama, and you should feel nothing but gratitude for that.
In the phone hacking case, Prince Harry told the court that every single article played a destructive role in his life.
— Sky News (@SkyNews) June 6, 2023
There are no cameras in court so as part of a special programme Sky News has recorded what was said by the Duke, played by an actor.
Watch ☟ pic.twitter.com/fxUx0ngOt5
Some aspects of the show are slightly confusing, admittedly. The world must be absolutely brimming with posh, ginger, balding, bearded actors just itching for the chance to finally play the one contemporary real-life figure they most closely resemble, so it’s a little odd that Harry in Court chose someone who wasn’t remotely any of those things. Not to crap on the actor who plays Harry on the show (referred to throughout the programme as “our actor”), because god knows this would be an utterly thankless task for anyone, but the poor soul looks nothing like the guy. In fact, if he looks like anything at all, then it is Neil Patrick Harris doing his worst possible work as a kind of deliberately offensive Noel Edmonds cosplay. It’s bizarre.
And it isn’t as if he has particularly gripping material to work with, either. On the basis of yesterday, at least, Harry’s testimony wasn’t exciting or charismatic, and it was honestly heartbreaking to watch someone attempt to imbue any sort of recognisable humanity on to it. Full marks for trying, with his searching eyes and occasional sneer, but not even Daniel Day-Lewis could have achieved much with material as poor as this.
The staging, too, is genuinely unhinged. As much as the Michael Jackson Trial show often resembled an inept demonstration of the medium of claymation, at least it actually took place in a courtroom. Not here, though. Harry stands at a lectern in the middle of the Sky News studio, shot from all angles like he’s the world’s crappest gameshow prize. Whenever the Harry actor needs to interact with anyone, rather than just monologue, it falls to presenter Jonathan Samuels to play all the other roles in the courtroom. And when the actor speaks, devoid of any visual context, it’s usually just to break up the endless churning commentary about the trial, from an old Mirror editor and a media lawyer. It’s a little like those rubbish tourist attractions you’d be forced to go on for your school trips. He’s like one of those dirtied-up mannequins that stands there lifelessly until someone presses an unsanitary plastic button, causing it to spring into life and jerk through a tedious monologue about arable farming.
Last night Sky News promised that Harry in Court would not let up for as long as Harry was actually in court. Every day he says something under oath, they’ll be there at 9pm, reenacting the pants out of it. But why stop there? My hope – my genuine, sincere hope – is that they just keep the actor in the studio long after the trial ends. Maybe he can just wordlessly lurk in the background through bulletins like a haunted carnival dummy. Maybe on quiet news days they could even let him have a crack at the juicier chapters from Harry’s book, Spare. Tell me you wouldn’t tune in to see him get off his face on mushrooms and have a conversation with a bin. I certainly would.
Seriously, it’s days like this that you wish The Crown had carried on into the present day. Because, if it had, then Harry in Court would have almost certainly taken up an entire episode of its own. Imagine it. An actor playing Prince Harry, watching an actor playing Prince Harry play Prince Harry, reading out Prince Harry’s real life words on a television programme about Prince Harry, on a different television programme about Prince Harry. This sort of thing would have almost certainly broken a hole in the space-time continuum and destroyed the lot of us in a swirl of flames. Bring it on, I say.
