- Title: Secret Lives: Princess Margaret
- Date: 28th January 1997
- Summary: A SAD, INQUISITIVE LOOK AT THE QUEEN'S SISTER. In a stinging attack last year, PRINCESS MARGARET accused the Duchess of York of discrediting the Royal Family. "Never once have you hung your head in embarrassment.. clearly you have never considered the damage you're causing us," she wrote. But this statement inevitably put Princess Margaret under the spotlight. Twenty years earlier, she arrived in shame at Heathrow airport, having been photographed by a tabloid newspaper holidaying on the island of Mustique with a lover 17 years her junior. Princess Margaret was born into disappointment. In August 1930 the Home Secretary had hurried to Glamis Castle in Scotland on urgent state business. It was his duty to attend any royal birth and the King Emperor George V was expecting his second grandchild. The first had been a girl - Elizabeth - but with no other royal babies on the horizon, there were high hopes that this new baby might be a future King. The new baby was a girl and the home secretary took away with him depressing news - there was still no prince. Today, people who know her describe Princess Margaret as an enigma. At times the most royal of royals, at others rebellious, outrageous and downright rude, Margaret has grown up continually in the shadow of her elder sister. Princess Margaret's life has been a barometer for the changing fortunes of the House of Windsor. She was the last royal not to go to school, to never carry cash or her own credit card. She is perceived as having forsaken her personal happiness on the altar of royal duty when she gave up the love of her life, Peter Townsend. Secret Lives sheds new light on this apparent sacrifice. Nevertheless she was the first royal to marry a commoner, in the first televised royal wedding, and the first, in modern times, to divorce. Her colourful private life was the first to come under the scrutiny of the tabloid press. Secret Lives is a vivid portrayal of a Princess who has both clung to the traditional pomp of monarchy and railed against its restrictions. The affair with Roddy Llewellyn had been going on for a couple of years before the tabloid photographs appeared. It was a refuge for the Princess from her unhappy marriage to Lord Snowdon. She visited a hippy commune with Llewellyn - a throwback to her attempts to enjoy a bohemian lifestyle when she and the then Tony Armstrong Jones were secretly courting. It ended in tears for the Princess and allowed Snowdon the divorce he wanted.
- Broadcaster:Channel 4
- Collection: Channel 4
- Genre:Documentary and Factual
- Producer:Unspecified
- Programme Episode:Episode 1
- Transmission Date:28/01/1997
- Rights:On Request
- Decade: 1990s