Time to grit your teeth and not just because Meghan has scattered her damnable flower sprinkles on the snacks again.
Our favourite petal pest of a hostess is back with a second series of With Love, Meghan (Netflix) and it pains me to report that her lifestyle show is the same old fiesta of fakery, garnished with idiotic nasturtiums and the oily camaraderie of total strangers trying to pretend they are lifelong friends.
I try to like it, but I simply cannot. Like a squid on a hot grill, I curl up at the edges every time this cottagecore version of the Duchess of Sussex gift wraps a cake or simpers about her apple butter or how her Ayurvedic doctor made her eat dates when she was pregnant.
For throughout all eight cheesy-grin episodes the camera cannot manufacture natural warmth or create the kind of real bonhomie that is desperately needed.
But – more importantly – nor can it conceal the chasm between the I’m-so-lovely Meghan on screen and the chilly off-screen reality of her well-documented life.
For here is a woman who has burned every bridge she has ever crossed, has suffered from multiple accusations of bullying (always denied) and ghosts anyone who has ever displeased her, including her own father. Every time she beatifically chirps on about baking cookies as gifts to ‘show up with love’ or of gifting cashmere socks to ‘nurture and value’ her friends I think – OK, but what about your poor old dad? Bet he would love a biscuit, a home cooked meal or a care package now and again.
Throw him a crumb, Meghan! He’s alone, he is 81 years old, he is in poor health. But no. His estranged daughter is too busy giving expensive presents to her new best friend, Queer Eye’s Tan France, while making him a cup of lavender grey latte, a drink she just invented that consists of Earl Grey tea, honey, frothed milk and vanilla essence. It makes me feel sick, in more ways than one.
To be scrupulously fair, viewers should know this is not a new series or a second series, but a continuance of the Netflix footage shot alongside the original episodes, which were broadcast last year. In culinary terms you could call it leftovers, you could call it table scraps, but you certainly could not call it a feast of insights, hints and tips to thrill lifestyle fans.
Meghan has returned for a second season of With Love, Meghan
We are back in the same fake home with a different set of fake friends all pretending that they love, worship and admire the domestic goddess Meghan, especially when she puts a tomato on toast, suggests adding turmeric to marshmallows, makes a passion fruit vinaigrette, shows off that she can speak Spanish, reveals how to open a packet of icing sugar without any spillage and explains how to pack a suitcase.
‘Heavy things in the bottom first, like shoes,’ she says, and I am not joking. It would have been funnier if she had said: ‘Heavy things in the bottom first, like this emerald tiara.’ But when a show is helmed by someone who is as thrilled with herself as the Duchess, there is no room for humour. None.
Exactly who is this With Love, Meghan aimed at, I wonder? Those homemakers who find TikTok recipes and open-this-end instructions on a packet of frozen puff pastry too challenging? And of course, Meghan never misses an opportunity to sugar-coat her own legend or promote her As Ever product range.
‘We all know I like my edible flowers,’ she says with a smirk, as if she were Escoffier himself, slyly referencing his greatest creation, the Peach Melba. The flowers cost £11.60 a tin on her As Ever website. They are decorative but flavourless, superfluous and useless and I’m saying nothing.
Meanwhile, the first episode of this series was absolutely chaotic. Crispy fried eggs, flank steaks marinated in apple juice, ikebana, lipstick-coloured lettuces, Korean barbecue, peeling peas, pickling vegetables? At one point our Meghan – the woman who put the boasting into hosting – retires to her luxury craft barn to ‘marble’ silk scarves in her silk scarf marbling bath, as you do. ‘How special it is to create something so unique,’ she congratulates herself afterwards, before taking part in a competitive flower arranging sequence with a couple of ‘New York culinary legends’ called David Chang and Christina Tosi.
‘I like things not particularly symmetrical,’ says Meghan, clearly a loving reference to her husband’s ears.
And it is interesting that although Harry and Meghan are highly protective of their privacy, she still spoons in as many references to her husband and children as possible – he doesn’t like lobsters, they love cookies – and we all know why.
For they are not just the icing on Meghan’s Netflix cake, they are the royal reason the cake got baked and this series got made in the first place.
Charisma-free Daniel Martin, left, has come back for the new instalment
Model Chrissy Teigan, right, reminds viewers of Meghan’s Hollywood connections
Without them she is just another actress with a jampreneur dream who hopes that maybe one day she will bake onion tarts on a cooking show with her make-up artist friend, Daniel.
Yes, I am afraid so. One of the few returning guests is the charisma-free Daniel Martin. Here he chops vegetables, repeats everything Meghan says and makes too many references to his diminutive size. ‘This is too small for my big manly hands,’ he notes. ‘Mine is small and mighty,’ he says of his flower creation.
One can see Meghan’s malignant influence as the show’s executive producer here, because in the real world, any television executive worth their salt flakes would have said ‘for God’s sake, lose the weird bald guy’.
Yet here is Daniel again, prowling around the kitchen like a damp pink blancmange, a pal whose friendship with Meghan does not make him interesting. The same applies to her friend Heather, who pops up in episode seven when the girls travel to LA to take a pottery class and then learn how to mix cocktails in what looks like an outpost of Soho House. It is all very Anthea Turner, all very Blue Peter, all very, very indulgent.
‘It’s really fun if you don’t take it seriously,’ Meghan says at one point, and really, wouldn’t it be wonderful if viewers could say the same? ‘It brings me so much joy to see everyone having so much fun,’ she says later, and it’s nice that someone is happy.
What else did we learn? Only that Meghan doesn’t much like baking, she hasn’t juiced for 20 years, she adores thoughtful plating, she doesn’t use a guard when slicing on a mandoline, she puts basil and rosemary ice cubes in her sparkling raspberry lemonade to ‘infuse flavour’ and she likes wearing neutrals. Wait, what? ‘I normally dress monochromatically,’ she told the world, which is news to those of us who heard her moaning on the Netflix documentary Meghan & Harry, that she wasn’t allowed to wear bright colours when she was a working member of the Royal Family.
The sense of awkwardness never quite disappears, not helped by the fact that Meghan sometimes speaks English as if she were from another planet. ‘This is when I will take the support of this electric hand mixer,’ she says as if she were a Smash potato Martian.
In contrast, the series finale features José Andrés, a Spanish-American chef whose natural ebullience only highlighted the strained excrescence of what had gone before. He turned up with a whole ham, a wheel of blue cheese made in his dead mother’s honour, and explained about a sea urchin’s gonads. Meghan looked horrified and no wonder.
This series is all much of a muchness for the Duchess of Smugness. And perhaps it is beginning to dawn on her this experiment to turn her into the next Martha or Gwyneth or Delia or yes even Anthea has failed. This is only the second series – but I bet a set of urchin’s gonads it will be the last.
