In his first extensive television interview, the prince, who turned 20 September 15, also expressed his anguish over the ongoing controversy over his mother's troubled marriage, which he felt overshadowed her charitable works.
The interview is part of an ITV documentary on the two months the prince spent in AIDS-afflicted Lesotho, southern Africa, earlier this year.
"It's been a long time now [since she died], not for me, but for most people," he says. "The stuff that's come out has been bad . . . these tapes and everything."
While he was in Lesotho, audio tapes of Princess Diana discussing her marriage breakdown and the Prince of Wales's adultery with her biographer Andrew Morton were aired worldwide.
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"Luckily, I've been out here (in Lesotho) so I haven't really heard about it but I feel bad because my father and my brother have been taking the stick instead. It's just a shame, it's a shame that, after all the good she's done, even this far on, people can't
"All they want to bring out is the bad stuff. I mean, bad news sells," he says. "I'm not here to change that. All I'm out here doing is what I want to do, doing what she'd want me to do, and it's not a question of reminding everyone of what good she did, because everyone knows that, hopefully."
He also admitted that he and his brother William found balancing their royal duties with a normal life was "pretty hard work."
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"William and I try to be normal, it's very difficult, but you know, we are who we are," he says.
The half hour documentary, The Forgotten Kingdom - Prince Harry in Lesotho shows the prince playing with AIDS orphans at a children's home and cradling an infant who was raped by her mother's boyfriend. It also has interviews with local doctors and aid workers.
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"I always wanted to go to an Aids country to carry on my mother's legacy as much as I can," says Harry. "I believe I've got a lot of my mother in me, basically, and I think she'd want us to do this, me and my brother."
"I don't want to take over from her because I never will. I don't think anyone can, but I want to try to carry it on to make her proud."
