It is ill-advised to form judgments based on the behaviour of a talkshow audience, a group whose sympathies – stoked by hours of anticipation and the sunken cost of a day off work – would rally for any guest above the level of a pot plant. Still, after a week of intense media coverage in the US, Prince Harry stepping out before a studio audience on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night was the first sight we had of him interacting with something approximating the American public.
For days, American news outlets had speculated that the rollout around Spare was becoming overblown. But that night in New York, the audience heaved to its feet and gave the 38-year-old “husband, father, military veteran and activist”, per Colbert’s introduction, a warm standing ovation. Harry smiled sheepishly. It was, for British observers, deeply, unsettlingly odd.
Full confession: having avoided the Netflix series and feeling reluctant to read the book, I’ve still hoovered up every last scrap of Harry publicity this week, traded countless texts speculating on the credibility of his accusations and put in solid bitching time behind the caveat “this is unsisterly, but …”.
Among my social group in New York, there is a marked difference between the attitude towards Spare of English and Australian friends – obsessive, feverish, genuinely shocked that Harry has been tempted quite so far out on to the ledge – and the uninterested and mildly baffled response of Americans. Most of them, in my experience, have gone on a journey from a near-universal “good for you” when Harry and Meghan moved out here, to a taken-aback “wow, this guy is really going for it”, to something, this week, closer resembling boredom. Meanwhile, Brits are snapping back and forth with “the man’s literally gone mad”.
This assessment is less a function of what Harry has said than the number and range of venues in which he has said it. On Colbert, his nervousness appeared in the form of currying favour with the audience – “I think there are some veterans in the house tonight?!” he said, looking out across the crowd. He got a big cheer for “America is a great place to live!” The New York Times summarised Colbert’s approach as “probing but respectful” and also rallied some voices, including ex-reality stars, to pour scorn on Harry’s oversharing.
As a former royal, Harry is the last person on earth with an intuitive sense of where to draw the line between healthy honesty and inadequate boundaries, and as the show unfolded it was hard not to cringe. He did a brief skit with Tom Hanks, mugged with some extras dressed up in royal livery, and looked uncomfortable as Colbert segued into a question about grief over his mother. Watching, I settled on what feels like the only adequate response to all this: poor bugger.
This sense of pity for the man was particularly acute given the fact that no one really cares about Harry in the US, where he will never be more than a sideshow. The revelations spilled in Spare this week fell somewhere in the American news list between the floods in California, the chaos over the election of the new House speaker and the Golden Globes.
And while the book-buying audience in the US is much bigger than in the UK, there was a sense that Harry’s performance was, of course, put on largely for the hated audience back home – right down to the up-yours of his slightly laboured transatlantic accent. (Harry has been in the US for a few years, enough time, in my experience, for an English person to give way on “tomato”, or at a pinch “water”, but nothing like the solid decade needed to erode “route” – “root” in British English – to the American “rowt”, as Harry pronounced it in his interview with Anderson Cooper.)
As Harry would say, the “narrative” of his escape from tradition and stultifying protocol is an admirable one, but let’s face it, it has been traded for another, almost equally rigid set of protocols. On Tuesday night, he talked about the need to “give space” to his “experiences without any shame”. He talked about his “mental health journey” and the “power in sharing”. He won a round of applause when Colbert mentioned “removing yourself from a toxic situation”.
English friends with American spouses saw in this performance the fruits of a regular complaint from their other halves – namely, that they “talk it out” with their English families, bring things up, put things on the table, confront difficulties, and the irritation they sometimes feel at having to explain and defend the use in English family life of structural silence. It’s mostly damaging, one understands that. But occasionally it’s a useful and effective diplomacy that isn’t merely a case of avoidance.
To see in Harry’s good-natured self-parody something vaguely shocking and undignified is probably a result of my own unhealthy conditioning. Ditto the amount of tutting I’ve done over his desire to have his cake – retaining the “Duke of Sussex” branding – and eat it, by poking fun at the whole shebang. But while his assertion that the Queen had had an “amazing career” made me smile on Tuesday night, watching him this week has been mostly a sad affair. The audience chanted “Harry! Harry!” and half ruefully, Harry smiled. Poor bugger.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
