2 weeks Ago By Jane Fryer
Another Christmas, another creative offering from Harry and Meghan, those titans of television, forever beavering away in their Montecito mansion. Two years ago we had the six-part Harry & Meghan mini-series – the first program of their AUD$156m Netflix deal from which they promised to produce “content that informs but also gives hope” through a “truthful and relatable lens”. Since then, we’ve had one decent documentary about Harry’s Invictus Games and another, less good, about leadership.
Their $40million Archetypes podcast for Spotify was scrapped in 2023 after just 12 episodes. And despite a lot of talk about a cookery programme hosted by Meghan, there is still no show. But none of that has dampened their spirits.
Because now they bring us Polo. Not, sadly, the next series of the brilliantly naughty adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire romp-a-thon, courtesy of Disney+. But instead a five-part docu-series about the breathtakingly elite world of polo, which will “pull the curtain back on the grit and passion of the sport”.
To be fair, in the opening moments it does promise rather a lot – that we’re going to enjoy “one of the most thrilling sports you can imagine”, full of “dirty, sweaty, sexy boys riding”. There is a lot of drama and tension, including a man in a fuchsia polo shirt smashing up a cool box with his stick. The “drama” centres around the build-up to the World Cup in Florida, where a lot of very slim women with very smooth faces and less smooth necks will cheer on menfolk who take it all very seriously indeed.
“Our life is on the line every time we get out there,” says one player, as if he’s a fireman or a marine, or perhaps a disaster relief worker. “Polo is not just a sport. Polo is a lifestyle,” cries another.
And they clearly work hard at it, because they’re all wonderfully ripped, with astonishingly white teeth, strong forearms, expensive watches, Louis Vuitton holdalls and chests like brick walls. We see them lift weights and sky dive, go deep-sea fishing and drive cars with lovely leather interiors. We learn that Timmy Dutta, 22, is a sweet boy whose career is funded by his overbearing dad, always shouting “we’re here for one thing and that’s to win”.
And that Argentina’s Adolfo Cambiaso is the “Michael Jordan of polo”. Louis Devaleix, who plays for a team called La Fe – which he also happens to own – is the cool-box smasher. He has a nasty temper and doesn’t seem to care much about his ponies.
“I don’t even know what my f***ing horses’ names are!” he says. It seems odd that executive producers Harry and Meghan were so desperate to share this ghastly world with the rest of us. But despite criticism that the sport is ferociously elitist, a carbon disaster and not very nice for the horses (don’t get Peta started, for goodness’ sake), Meghan is said to adore the whole scene.
And according to his best mate and fellow polo player Nacho Figueras, it has always been Harry’s “dream and passion to share with the world what it takes to be a really competitive polo player”. Though, sadly, not in person. Because while they were “very hands on” in the making, they are not really in it – other than a five-second cameo from Harry and a brief joint appearance in episode five.
But their ridiculous polo pals do their best to make up for that – explaining that there are four in a team, six seven-and-a-half minute “chukkas” (periods of play) to a game and that riders change horses “like Formula One drivers”. Strutting about in tight trousers, they pipe up with comments such as “he was hand made by God to play polo”. Awful though it all is, I wonder whether, in the right hands, it could have been fun, guilty-pleasure TV – a sort of brilliant mash-up of Rivals, Selling Sunset and Welcome to Wrexham – that made us shout the telly in horrified joy.
Instead it is flat, plodding and really rather boring. If it tried, it couldn’t be any further from “content that informs but also gives hope”. Polo is streaming on Netflix.
