Harry and Meghan labelled ‘bruised and vulnerable’ by documentary maker

The journalist who presented a documentary about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said things aren’t ‘entirely rosy’ behind the scenes for the royal couple.

Tom Bradby said the pair seemed ‘bruised and vulnerable’ during the filming of an ITV documentary about their royal tour to southern Africa.

The ITV News presenter set out to make a documentary about their philanthropic work but the film turned into an insight into the pair’s wellbeing.

In Harry & Meghan: An African Journey, Prince Harry opened up about the impact negative press attention was having on his family and confessed that he and his brother, the Duke of Cambridge, are on ‘different paths’.

Meanwhile, the Duchess of Sussex revealed she had been struggling with being criticised in the media, telling Bradby that she was not really ‘okay’.

Bradby, who has been friends with Prince Harry since he was a teen, said he was aware the couple had been struggling and encouraged them to open up in his interviews.

Speaking on Good Morning America he said: ‘I’d seen them obviously before we left and had a pretty long chat and so I formed a certain view there.

‘And I speak to Harry relatively often and have done over the years so, as I said, I knew that things weren’t entirely brilliant behind the scenes, but it sort of built as the tour went on really.

‘The reality I found was just a couple that seemed a bit bruised and vulnerable.

‘That was the story I found and it seemed the right journalistic thing to do, to try and tell that story as empathetically as I could.’

Bradby said he had a ‘couple of private heart-to-hearts’ with Prince Harry ahead of filming and that he advised the royal:  ‘Let’s just go out and tell the truth as you see it.’

The documentary, which aired in the UK on Sunday, saw the Duke and Duchess of Sussex stray from the royal family’s traditional route of staying stoic in the face of hardship — a path Harry’s older brother Prince William, has chosen to take.

In the documentary Price Harry tells Bradby: ‘Look, part of this job and part of any job, like everybody, means putting on a brave face and turning a cheek to a lot of the stuff. But again, for me and for my wife, of course, there’s a lot of stuff that hurts — especially when the majority of it is untrue’.

And Meghan tells the presenter she hopes people will one day come to understand and focus on the love she and Harry share for one another.

Bradby said: ‘I think some of what they were doing here was just emotional, it was just saying well this is where we’re at, and some of it was trying to do things differently’.

He added: ‘If this documentary has an outcome, I do hope that it’s that everyone, perhaps including them, takes a really deep breath and maybe thinks really hard about how the future may play out’.