The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are hardly averse to taking matters to court. From their privacy tussles with the Mail on Sunday to the recent revelation that the taxpayer has forked out £300,000 over Prince Harry’s High Court challenge to the Home Office about his security arrangements when visiting the UK (he wanted to pay for police protection for his family, but was informed that the British police were not available for private hire, like taxis), the couple appear to regard legal action as a regrettable necessity that will ensure ‘their truth’ comes out into the world.

Yet now, at last, they seem to have reached their limit. When ‘The Worldwide Privacy Tour’, a recent episode of the hit American cartoon show South Park was aired, it brutally mocked the couple as fame-obsessed and vacuous, chasing dollars from corporations by turning themselves into products.

At the end of the episode, Prince Harry has an epiphany of sorts and declares that he wants to lead a normal life. But his wife – described in the show as ‘sorority girl, actress, influencer, victim’ by an eager brand manager – refuses to give up the opportunities and privileges that her fame (or notoriety) has offered her.

South Park brutally mocked the couple as fame-obsessed and vacuous

It is a damning, biting attack on the pair. Inevitably there were reports that Harry and Meghan were contemplating legal action. These suggestions have now, however, been dispelled by a spokesman for the couple, who described the scuttlebutt as ‘all frankly nonsense’, and said of the speculation – and, by implication, the show – that it was ‘baseless and boring.’ Words, I fear, that will be used out of context to describe the troublesome prince and his ‘sorority girl, actress, influencer, victim’ wife many, many more times in the future.

Although the publication of Spare and attendant publicity campaign was a commercial success, it has had the side-effect of turning Prince Harry into a laughing stock on both sides of the Atlantic. The Duke appears to have long since accepted that his public reputation in Britain is negligible – he’s ranked as the ninth most popular member of the Royal Family by YouGov, only beating Meghan and Prince Andrew – yet it must rankle that the United States, where the Sussexes have made their home and are pursuing their commercial interests, has rounded on them as well.

The regrettable revelation in Spare that the Duke applied his mother’s favourite Elizabeth Arden cream to his frostbitten penis was satirised by the late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, who imagined the existence of a children’s book The Prince and the Penis, and ended with Harry saying: ‘But mummy, have you heard about Sir Sigmund Freud?’.

The Duke and Duchess may have calculated that making as little fuss as possible about the South Park episode is the wisest course of action. They may well be right. Tom Cruise was reported to have been unhappy over the 2005 episode ‘Trapped in the Closet’, which satirised both him and Scientology. There were reports that Cruise sought to get the episode pulled from circulation. This was denied by the film star’s spokesman, but the resulting furore helped ensure the episode become one of the show’s most iconic and popular.

It is impossible to say whether ‘The Worldwide Privacy Tour’ will enjoy similar longevity, or whether Harry and Meghan’s decision to hope that the show is soon forgotten as the news cycle moves on will be the correct one. But as the Coronation, and the question of their attendance, looms ahead like a monolith, chances of their fading away remain negligible.