Is a TV drama about the royal family sacrilege?

Filming on The Palace was only a few weeks in when the rumours started flying. ‘A tawdry and offensive affair’ trumpeted the Sunday Telegraph; ‘dreadful and offensive and very near to the bone’, added Lord St John of Fawsley; ‘a real danger [it will] undermine support for the [royal] family’, weighed in a media watchdog. To the cast and crew, such reports were flabbergasting, not least because those talking so authoritatively about the television series in question were yet to see an episode. We wondered if this hatchet job might be some sort of publicity stunt (it bore similarities to some of our storylines, after all) — before it became obvious that no, it was simply that we had dared to stray into sacrosanct territory. If we were to assume the lives of a fictitious British royal family, we must be prepared to take the flak.

And yet the vitriolic response to the very idea of The Palace (rather than its finished product) has been an instructive one, raising questions about the peculiar relationship the British public enjoys with its monarchy.