oprah harry meghan

Harry and Meghan in a screenshot from their interview with Oprah Winfrey. Photo: YouTube/CBS

SA YouTuber pranks royal commentators with Harry and Meghan’s big interview [watch]

Watch as SA’s Josh Pieters and comedian, Archie Manners dupe royal commentators to comment on the TV special days before its broadcast.

oprah harry meghan

Harry and Meghan in a screenshot from their interview with Oprah Winfrey. Photo: YouTube/CBS

Four royal commentators were recently fooled into participating in interviews about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry‘s tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey, despite not having seen the interview.

SA YouTuber pranks royal commentators

According to The New Zealand Herald, the prank, orchestrated by South African-born YouTuber Josh Pieters and his pal, Archie Manners duped the experts into agreeing to interviews about Meghan under the guise of a fake production company. They were paid appearance fees for the interviews – the amounts of which were undisclosed.

The two of them called the prank ‘We Proved Royal Experts Lie About Harry and Meghan’.

The Queen’s former press secretary Dickie Arbiter, CNN‘s royal commentator Victoria Arbiter, Majesty magazine editor Ingrid Seward and commentator Richard Fitzwilliams featured in the video published on 6 March 2021. The experts were then tricked into giving comments about the Sussexes’ interview with Oprah before the conversation aired, and commented on how it went as if they had seen it.

Seward said in the clip: “To my mind, this was an actress giving one of her great performances – from start to finish, Meghan was acting.”

Fitzwilliams said it was “not a balanced interview” and accused Winfrey of being “totally sympathetic” to Meghan. He added Meghan “used extremely strong language to describe her relations with members of the royal household”.

Lying about Harry and Meghan

Pieters and Manners asked specific questions about the interview and pretended Meghan said that she would refuse the COVID-19 vaccine and pledged her support for a donkey sanctuary.

Pieters told Insider: “We gave them facts, which weren’t facts, and they spoke about them as facts.”

In an interview with The Guardian, he further explained the reasoning behind the prank.

“The arrangement was that the comments would be broadcast depending on what was in the interview, so nothing inappropriate would have appeared from anyone contributing,” he said.

According to 2OceansVibe, when criticised, Fitzwilliams said that this sort of pre-recording is frequently done for news stories, and there “is nothing whatever dishonourable in it”.

Manners responded by likening the responses to “asking a football commentator to give me 90 minutes of voice-noting on [a match they haven’t seen]”, adding that these ‘experts’ regularly shape public opinion towards members of the Royal Family.

The Pranksters

Josh Pieters and Archie Manners have been involved in some elaborate pranks. From pranking Carole Baskin into doing her first interview since the release of Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness on Netflix to duping Katie Hopkins into accepting a fake award.