Queen of people's hearts

To commemorate the 10th anniversary from the tragic death of Princess Diana, Toni Sant wrote this cover story in yesterday's Times Weekender which he also posted in his blog:

Princess Diana deserves coverage because people still love her. This is the reason you're reading yet another feature about Diana. While some people may genuinely have had more than enough of Diana 10 years on from the fatal car accident that left her, her boyfriend and their drunk driver dead, others will undoubtedly consider it near blasphemous that anyone can do anything but love her. Before I started writing these few words about Diana, I thought there was nothing really new to add. Then I started to do some research and realised that like Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison and a handful of other dead iconic celebrities from the entertainment world, she will possibly live on forever in a huge hall of referential mirrors.

The most interesting of all these mirrors, for me, is not in one of the never-ending stream of books published about her, to say nothing of the countless newspaper and magazine articles. Princess Diana is mostly on my mind this year through the daring comedic bravado of Ricky Gervais, who is known in Malta mostly through his BBC series The Office. The British comedian has written (and appears in) an episode of the popular animated TV series The Simpsons. This episode, which first aired in the United States and Britain this past spring, dares to lampoon Lady Di in a way that hasn't been seen since Spitting Image delighted millions in the Commonwealth. I would argue that this new joke is funnier because it is very subtle and is inserted almost exclusively for the cognoscenti of popular culture...

The Diana-Morrissey phenomenon