On 27 November 2017, Clarence House announced that Prince Harry had proposed to American actor Meghan Markle and that they would marry in spring 2018. Their relationship had been officially acknowledged a year earlier on the back of what the Prince's Communication Secretary characterised as a ‘wave of abuse and harassment’ from online trolls and some media pundits (Communication Secretary 2016). By the time of the announcement, the impending royal wedding was being framed as blissfully romantic, with the Prince's declaration that he knew Markle was ‘the one’ the first time they met being circulated across social media (Reslen 2017). Still, it seemed that the media was divided on how to cover the union, partly undermining the pairing in reports marked by ‘racial undertones … and … outright sexism’ (Communication Secretary 2016) and partly swooning over the romantic appeal of what was seen as a highly unlikely and thus especially absorbing pairing (see also Weidhase in this volume).

Some journalists drew parallels between the couple's relationship and that of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Rosenwald 2017), whilst others found a more apt comparison in the controversial liaison between Prince Andrew and American actor Koo Stark in the 1980s (Ridley 2017). Regardless of which historical lens journalists employed, the descriptor ‘fairy-tale’ was frequently adopted (Ellison 2017). Many commentators attempted to fit Meghan and Harry's courtship into what Sue Short sees as the quintessential fairy-tale narrative – that of ‘the heroine who rises above misfortune and marries a prince … decisively putting an end to their woes by marrying Prince Charming’ (Short 2014: 21). However, Short's use of the ‘fairy-tale’ descriptor demonstrates the limitations of this outdated framework: for example, by ignoring Markle's long-standing television work – most notably as Rachel Zane on Suits (2011–). Crucially, however, all this shuffling around the media's positioning of the courtship may help account for why other commentators reframed it by turning to a more contemporary, though perhaps equally fantastical, narrative – that of the British–American film production company Working Title romcom (Freeman 2017).