On the very night that Monarch: The Royal Family at Work (BBC1, Monday) was being broadcast whom should I bump into at the Pen International quiz at the Café Royal in the queue for the coats but Stephen Lambert.
Lambert, you may remember, was the head of the independent production company RDF who personally edited that dodgy reel preview which seemed to show the Queen walking out in a huff from a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz, when in real life she hadn’t. As a result, he had to step down at RDF, while Peter Fincham lost his job as controller of the BBC, and dark things were muttered about the documentary being doomed never to see the light of day.
Well, that would have been stupid, wouldn’t it? You can’t secure hours and hours of ‘unprecedented access’ footage of the royal family, grab millions of pounds worth of publicity by being on the front page of every newspaper for a week, lose half your key staff and then decide to keep the programme locked in the vaults, can you? In fact, I’m slightly puzzled as to why the commentators who mooted this alarmist drivel expected to be taken seriously.
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