A conspiracy-free zone

Celebrity impersonators are so plentiful nowadays that I'm starting to believe those urban myths about famous people who enter lookalike contests and fail to win.

Saddam had so many clones that he may well have legged it out of Baghdad before the war even started, and it's rumoured that Michael Barrymore once entered a Barrymore impersonation competition held during the interval of a Christmas panto and came ninth (he claims never to have done Aladdin, but I have my doubts).

Then there was Elvis, who waddled on stage unannounced in a Maryland night club during his final obese period and was booed off for being disrespectful after warbling his latest mawkish release. And even more astonishingly, I recently discovered that there's someone called Tony Blair who, incredibly, has been pretending to be Prime Minister for the past six years.

I often wonder what happened to the dozens of Diana lookalikes (collective noun, "a pearl necklace"?) after their heroine was killed in the Alma tunnel in 1997. A documentary that chronicled their subsequent careers would be fascinating, and far more absorbing than last night's Diana: the Night She Died (C5), an hour of ill-formed speculation that resembled Panorama after an embolism (or, if you prefer, a present-day edition of Panorama).

During the frenzied period that followed her death, a British inquest was proposed, but it's never been held, and that gave the programme makers the cue they needed to declare that "the truth has been suppressed" by the French authorities. No it hasn't. The truth is that Henri Paul was drunk at the wheel, and we know that for a fact, because any sober Frenchman would surely have killed all four occupants of the car.

"We've been allowed to film the 27 volumes of confidential evidence the French inquiry gathered," boasted the narrator proudly, speaking as though the programme had unearthed top-secret information, rather than simply accessed documents that have already been widely studied. And sure enough, there were sufficient minor contradictions and inconsistencies buried in its 6,000 pages to fuel a conspiracy theorist's fevered brain for a decade, thereby enabling the programme to dispute the obvious facts surrounding a regrettable traffic accident. "Why was the tunnel reopened within four hours?" the narrator demanded to know (easy, because it's one of Paris's main transport routes); "Why was the accident scene scrubbed clean?" (even easier, because the city's main thoroughfares are cleaned early every morning); and "Why was the first witness on the scene ignored by police?", which was surely the simplest question of all. Because, like all good Parisian men, he was out on the tiles and smashed up against a wall at the time.

In an abortive attempt to appear authoritative, the script was littered with irrelevant information, such as, "The couple ate in the restaurant - she had sole, he had turbot" and "Previous occupants of the suite included Hermann Goering, Winston Churchill and Woody Allen". Worse, possessors of mere hearsay were treated as unimpeachable witnesses, including a man who'd met a man who'd been near the tunnel at the fateful time and had heard a noise "as though a car was revving hard in neutral", and a photographer who'd spoken to a traffic cop who said he'd seen a photograph of the Mercedes taken seconds before the crash.

A now-dead paparazzo called James Andanson was also vaguely implicated, on the grounds that he'd once owned a white Fiat Uno and allegedly possessed "the art of photographing people who then died suddenly", but the strangest criticism of all was of the entire French judicial system because it "... works to rules that haven't changed much since Napoleon". Well, considering that our own system dates back to the Middle Ages, it ill behoves us to label others as archaic, especially when, down at the Royal Courts of Justice, they have a special term of address for a lawyer with an IQ lower than 50. It's "Your Honour".

From JFK to Diana, the human mind looks for conspiracies and cover-ups in the face of death, reluctant to accept that such vitality and celebrity can be snuffed out by something as prosaic as a lone gunman with a grudge or a pissed driver losing control at the wheel. But while this programme tried to raise doubts, it was unable to suggest any alternative scenario to the standard one involving alcohol and a princess who forgot to clunk-click every trip (although personally I've often suspected that Henri Paul put his foot down only because Dodi and Diana had been involved in hanky-panky on the back seat and he had heard cries of "No, don't stop! ... faster, faster, don't stop! ..."

Poor Diana. She was the People's Princess. How well I remember all those years ago, when she (brings out onion) walked up the (sob) redcarpeted stairs of St (sob, sob) Paul's in that frock, and I suddenly thought of Richard Branson. Why? Because I was watching a long and very very slow train, with "Virgin" written all over it.