An advertising campaign once filmed by Sarah Ferguson, also known as Fergie, was rapidly pulled from the airwaves in 1997 after the Royal Family suffered a devastating tragedy. One of Sarah’s campaigns for the weight loss company, Weightwatchers, was quickly pulled from the airwaves amid concerns it would be in bad taste.
Princess Diana, with whom Fergie had created a tight relationship over the years, tragically died in August 1997 in a car crash in Paris as she was being followed by paparazzi, which plunged the nation into collective grief. The accident proved fatal, with only the Princess’s bodyguard surviving. Just as the tragedy unfolded, Sarah’s new advertising campaign with the weight loss company was about to air, with Prince Andrew’s ex-wife declaring in it that losing weight was “harder than outrunning the paparazzi.”
Before Diana’s passing, brochures featuring the line had been posted out to the company’s customers, and some adverts had been published in magazines that included the phrase.
The company knew it would be impossible to remove the brochures and magazines adverts, but they did have the power to remove one major branch of the campaign – the TV adverts.
The publicist in charge, Howard Rubenstein said at the time: “It has a touch of irony that nobody could have predicted. The duchess certainly is sensitive to the situation, and it’s just unfortunate that the mailing went out when it did.”
Commenting on Sarah, who cancelled appearances talking about the campaign, Rubenstein further said at the time: “I spoke to the duchess, and she is grieving greatly and out of respect will not be doing anything for the moment.”
“We were able to catch 95% of what was being done,” the publicist added.
Diana had been the one who is said to have initially set up Sarah and Andrew in the 1980s, and the pair were friends for a long time before marrying in 1986.
Fergie and Diana reportedly stopped speaking towards the end of Diana’s life. In a 2007 interview with the magazine, Harpers Bazaar, Fergie claimed: “The saddest thing, at the end, we hadn’t spoken for a year, though I never knew the reason, except that once Diana got something in her head…I tried, I wrote letters, thinking whatever happened didn’t matter, let’s sort it out. And I knew she’d come back.
“In fact, the day before she died, she rang a friend of mine and said, ‘Where’s that Red? I want to talk to her.'”