Just as a previous generation could tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news that President John F Kennedy had been assassinated, so two similarly iconic news events – 9/11 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales – have provided a more recent generation with their personal connections to age-defining dramas.

Twitter, in the last few days, has been awash with personal anecdotes, of memories of where they were and who they were with when the news filtered through that the princess had been badly injured in a car crash in Paris on the night of August 31, 1997. The words used to describe their feelings when her death was finally confirmed are common across the board: shocked, devastated, numb.

What’s less often referred to is the bizarre state of hysteria that gripped the nation in the next week leading up to Diana’s funeral. For five days, Britain became a very un-British place, with scenes of public grief more familiar to certain South American regimes in the 1950s.

Even the then Leader of the Opposition, William Hague, inadvertently encouraged comparisons with the death of Eva Peron by suggesting that Heathrow Airport be renamed after the princess (on the plus side, and as a significant consolation to the hearts that were broken that week and perhaps remain unhealed, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice have not yet written a musical about her).

At the time, and since, commentators gave the benefit of the doubt to the mourners, to those who stood in silence outside the gates of Buckingham Palace (where Diana had never lived and rarely visited in her last years) as they placed bouquets of flowers and hand-crafted tributes to “the People’s Princess”, then stood in all-consuming grief for a woman they had never met and were never likely to, even had she lived.

These public displays (or exhibitions) of grief were simply a nation trying to come to terms with its loss, we were reassured. Town halls up and down the country invited locals to sign their own books of remembrance for Diana, giving those unfortunate enough to be living outside the capital an opportunity to play even a small part in the on-going melodrama.

A recent BBC documentary about that week, featuring interviews from most of the main players – Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, Anji Hunter and many others, including Diana’s sister and senior people in the Queen’s household at the time – reminded viewers and the participants of the state of the country at the time. Interviewees didn’t quite say it, but you could see it briefly touching the tips of their tongues before they decided to swallow it: Britain went slightly mad.

That Diana was a good person, a loving mother and a doughty campaigner cannot be doubted. Her work with HIV patients alone established her as a vital catalyst in the fight to de-stigmatise the illness and its victims. And no better, media savvy exponent of the campaign to ban land mines could be conceived.

But in the end, Diana was a celebrity, a beautiful, attractive, alluring, clever famous person. That does not make the grief for her passing any less real or less justified. But it poses difficult questions about the motivations of those who succumbed to – who positively embraced – the hysteria of early autumn 1997.

For there was a profoundly selfish aspect to the mourners’ demands. The Queen, anxious to protect her grandsons and allow them to grieve in private, was criticised by countless members of the public – dutifully echoed in the press – who saw the aftermath of Diana’s death as about them, not her sons or her family.

The people were hurting, the people were angry, and the people demanded that the Royal Family return to London instead of “hiding” away in Balmoral, away from the spotlight and the media and the questions and the photographers.

After all, if she really was “the People’s Princess”, then surely “the People” should be in charge of what happens next?

And they got their way. The young princes, still clearly in a state of shock and grief, were duly exhibited in public for the benefit of the TV cameras and the onlookers. The march on Buckingham Palace, the overthrow of the monarchy, was postponed for another day, because the crowds finally got what they wanted.

What they wanted was cruel and selfish, but the important thing was they got it.

It’s hard to conceive, in the days before the advent of social media, how so many people could congregate at one place, all thinking and saying the same thing, all reflecting each other’s anger and sorrow and indignation.

Of course, there was a basic human desire to express emotions, to be among others who felt the same way, who could instantly and wordlessly empathise with them. A grief shared, and all that.

But even at the time, I suspected that at least part of the motivation was less noble. Diana’s death was a massive media event, and it got bigger as the week wore on. A celebrity – the world’s biggest celebrity – had died tragically and dramatically, the entire world was fixated and people wanted to be part of that story.

They wanted to be able to tell their friends and family that yes, they were there, they spoke to the TV reporters about what Diana meant to them, about how awful the world was going to be without her.

Some at the time welcomed what seemed to be the passing into history of the British “stiff upper lip”. It’s ironic that the poster conceived during the Second World War but never actually used in public, featuring the legend, “Keep Calm and Carry On”, subsequently became an iconic and popular image – particularly following the televised scenes in 1997 that utterly confounded the sentiment.

Oh what a circus, oh what a show…