Netflix has ignored pleas from William not to exploit Princess Diana’s bombshell Panorama Interview with Martin Bashir during the fifth series of The Crown in a two-episode bombshell – which even shows the prince watching it on TV as a schoolboy.

The popular series, which airs on November 9, is set to show the hour-long 1995 interview with the disgraced BBC journalist over two episodes and will include its most inflammatory parts.

It was initially thought that producers had cut the recreation to show just seconds of the interview, but it will instead be shortened to a four-minute and 23-second segment. 

The recreation will show William watching on as a schoolboy at Eton, while Charles will be seen shouting and crying as she casts doubts on his ability to be King, The Sun reports.

The interview will also include Diana’s sensational remarks that ‘there were three of us in the marriage’ – a reference to Charles and Camilla.

She will say she wanted to be a ‘Queen in people’s hearts’, but does not believe she will ever become Queen. 

But the decision to recreate the interview puts Netflix at odds with William, who has called for the groundbreaking scenes to never to be aired again. 

It also comes despite Prince Harry, who claimed the interview ‘lost his mother her life’, having signed a £112million deal with the streaming service for him and his wife Meghan.

He branded it ‘unethical’ and claimed the interview triggered the events that caused his mother to lose her life two years later.

Meanwhile, William said Bashir’s deceit in obtaining his 1995 chat with Diana hastened his parents’ divorce and ‘hurt countless others’ and called for it to never be aired again.

It comes as Netflix is also said to have exaggerated language and made up sections of the interview, according to The Sun. 

Majesty Magazine editor-in-chief Ingrid Seward told the newspaper: ‘William will be furious. He said his piece when he said it should never be aired again. This is his mother and her memory they are doing this to.

‘It must be very frustrating as he can’t say any more because it will just give Netflix more publicity.

‘They should have listened to him. The interview has no credibility after the investigation. Everyone knows it has no legitimacy now.

‘Charles will think they can say whatever they want about him but leave Harry and William out of it. He won’t give a stuff about how he comes across but just don’t attack his sons this way.’

The dramatisation of the interview will attribute blame to King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, and depict Diana in a sympathetic light.

Charles is shown yelling and swearing as Diana gives the interview, with the scene ending with him breaking down in tears alongside Camilla.

William, meanwhile, is shown watching the interview as a young boy attending Eton.

Visibly upset, his schoolmaster begins to console him, but William insists he is ‘fine’ before walking away from the TV.

A spokesperson for the prince has been approached for comment, but William said in April that the interview ‘played on her fears and fuelled paranoia’. 

Reacting to Lord Dyson’s damning report into how the original interview was obtained, he said: ‘It is welcome that the BBC accepts Lord Dyson’s findings in full – which are extremely concerning – that BBC employees: lied and used fake documents to obtain the interview with my mother; made lurid and false claims about the Royal Family which played on her fears and fuelled paranoia; displayed woeful incompetence when investigating complaints and concerns about the programme; and were evasive in their reporting to the media and covered up what they knew from their internal investigation.’

He added: ‘It is my view that the deceitful way the interview was obtained substantially influenced what my mother said.’

‘This Panorama programme holds no legitimacy and should never be aired again. It effectively established a false narrative which, for over a quarter of a century, has been commercialised by the BBC and others.’

The independent report plunged the BBC into one of the worst crises in its history, with the two royals accusing it of ruining their mother’s life and helping to bring about the events that led to her death two years later.

Despite this, the episodes have gone ahead as planned.

Insiders said: ‘The Crown’s creators see the interview as the keystone moment in series five. To the writers, the stormy marriage between Charles and Di led up to her outpouring on Panorama, and the aftermath of that decision defined her final months. 

‘They are making a huge investment in that. The Crown has a track record of delving into areas of the Royal Family’s history they’d rather be left alone.’

Bashir commissioned forged bank statements in flagrant breach of BBC rules to convince Earl Spencer to introduce him to Diana, Lord Dyson concluded in his excoriating inquiry.

Bashir admitted at the time to having the documents forged, but denied ever showing them to anybody.

It comes as Netflix is already facing accusations of ‘insensitivity’ from Diana’s friends after crews from The Crown were spotted filming the moments leading up to her fatal car crash – just 100 yards from the Paris tunnel where she died 25 years ago. 

Our exclusive photographs showed filming of a Mercedes in Paris near the site of the car crash that claimed her and Dodi Al Fayed’s lives.

Onlookers said Netflix crews were seen filming between 2am and 3am today around 100 yards from the Alma tunnel, where the crash happened in the early hours of August 31, 1997.

The pictures show a black Mercedes like the one the couple were travelling in on that tragic day being filmed in another nearby tunnel on the same road.

Netflix has insisted the ‘exact moment’ of the crash will not feature in the controversial drama, which has recently come under fire for sensationalism and inaccuracy.

A friend of Diana’s said the show’s makers could face accusations of ‘insensitivity’ over the filming in Paris. Debbie Frank, who was Diana’s astrologer, said it would be ‘terrible’ for Princes William and Harry to see a recreation of the moments leading up to their mother’s death.

‘It’s obviously terrible for Diana’s children to have to see that again. It’s insensitive,’ she said.

She added: ‘I feel Diana’s death and the crash was the biggest shock our generation. It had such a huge impact across the national psyche.

‘I guess the makers of The Crown feel they are entitled to show a re-enactment of scenes leading up to her death and that it has dramatic impact. But relatives would think otherwise.’

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: From divorces and infidelities to Diana’s infamous interview with Martin Bashir, there are no depths of bad taste that Netflix does not plumb in the new ten-part series of The Crown

There are no depths of bad taste that writer Peter Morgan does not plumb in the new ten-part series of The Crown on Netflix.

Divorces, infidelities, the most intimate conversations, the infamous interview with Princess Diana and Martin Bashir, even the death of a five-year-old from cancer, all are exploited for lurid drama.

As the eight-and-a-half hours of new film were made available to journalists last night, under a stringent embargo, the sheer virulence of the storylines became shockingly clear.

Charles, Philip and at times the Queen herself are portrayed with disdain bordering on mockery. A teenage Prince William is also shown in an unflattering light, as slightly dim and sulky, though his younger brother Harry is let off lightly and barely features.

Netflix may well find that, with the international grief and mourning that marked the death of the Queen less than two months ago, viewers’ appetite for royal muck-raking has disappeared.

Insiders at the streaming video giant say the mood in the company is already uneasy, with some American executives surprised by the backlash from fans who fear the death of the Princess of Wales will be re-enacted in graphic detail.

This series stops short of that moment. It ends with Diana, divorced from Charles, preparing for a Mediterranean holiday with her friend Dodi Fayed.

Full reviews, with assessments of individual performances and an analysis of how far the script strays from historical fact, are embargoed until Saturday morning.

But no spoiler alert is needed when I say that this series of The Crown is unrecognisable in its tone, compared to the original series in 2016.

This show with its almost unlimited budget and all-star cast has become a monstrous perversion of itself.

At the beginning, The Crown charted the affectionate romance of the Princess Elizabeth and her prince, the Duke of Edinburgh, played with touching vulnerability by Claire Foy and Matt Smith.

But it has descended into scandal-mongering, intent on inflicting every possible embarrassment on the Royal Family.

The Crown is now a nakedly republican polemic, using embarrassment as its chief weapon against the monarchy.

Chief victim is the monarch himself. Perhaps Morgan and his Netflix paymasters imagined, like most of us, that the Queen would survive, ruling above reproach, for a number of years to come – and that the Prince of Wales was fair game.

Certainly, none of the preview episodes (labelled, it ought to be said, as ‘work in progress’) carried an acknowledgment of Her Majesty’s death. Any viewers expecting a respectful caption, saluting her 70 years on the throne, will be disappointed.

But from the outset, the campaign against Charles is lacerating. In scene after scene, he is depicted as devious, impatient, resentful, devoid of self-awareness in his desperation to be king.

This prince is a plotter whose mind works constantly, even during holidays with friends, on ways to dislodge his mother and force her aside. His aides talk of little else.

Despite the fact that former Prime Minister John Major has categorically dismissed this picture as nonsense, Charles is seen making a pathetic fool of himself as he tries to recruit the Tory PM into his treacherous schemes.

Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles – now the King and Queen Consort, a fact shamefully ignored by Netflix – suffer greater indignity still, with the replay of that excruciating phonecall.

Dominic West as Charles and Olivia Williams as Camilla, then his married mistress, re-enact every word of it… including that awful extended metaphor about being reincarnated as a tampon.

It is performed without mercy, and to emphasise the humiliation we see the reaction of other royals when the transcript is published. Princess Margaret reads it in bed. Diana holds her head in her hands.

But even this is overshadowed by Netflix’s relish for the way the Princess of Wales was tricked into a damaging TV interview by Martin Bashir of the BBC.

The affair is spread across two episodes, as Bashir is shown meeting Diana in a dimly lit car park and feeding lies to her, urging her to trust no one, at a time when her mental health was at its most fragile.

When the interview airs, long sections of it are restaged, despite Prince William’s insistence that it should never be aired because it harmed his mother so much.

We hear Elizabeth Debicki, as Diana, discussing her post-natal depression after William was born, her conviction that allegations that she was ‘crazy’ were used to discredit her, her fears for her children and her belief that Charles would never be king.

Some of these lines are spoken as we watch other members of the Royal Family, either glued to their TV sets or pointedly ignoring the broadcast. Charles reacts with rage, shouting, ‘What the hell is she doing?’

Prince William (played by Senan West, Dominic’s son) is seen at Eton: a teacher asks if he is all right, and the boy, then 13, says, ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ before getting up and walking away.

But the camera is trained on Diana’s face as she murmurs the most famous line from the interview: ‘Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.’

Equally callous is the decision by Morgan to include the death of Leonora Knatchbull, granddaughter of Lord Mountbatten, who was just five when she died from kidney cancer in 1991.

We see her in the first ten minutes of episode one, as Charles and the girl’s father, his friend Norton, admire the child’s curly hair and discuss her treatment.

In the second episode, Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) visits Leonora’s grave with her mother, Penny. Both Norton and Penny are still alive, and friends say they are distressed at the thought of their child’s death being presented on screen.

Their feelings, and those of all the Royal Family, are ignored. Netflix and Peter Morgan treat them with cold-blooded contempt. Rarely has a drama been more cruel.

How Prince Harry, who professes hatred of any media exploitation of his mother’s memory or intrusion into his own life, can continue to be associated with Netflix defies belief.

His own media company, Archewell Productions, has signed a deal with Netflix worth a rumoured $100 million (£87.2m). That will have to be a matter between Harry and his conscience.