Is a TV drama about the royal family sacrilege?

5 January 2008

Clemency Burton-Hill, who appears in the new ITV series The Palace, muses on the outrage it has provoked and the taboos that still govern fictional portrayals of the monarchy

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.

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ian skidmore

January 4th, 2008 6:01pm Report this comment

does your employee get paid extra for doing the PR on th film in which she is moonlighting. Or have you abandoned yet another journalistic convention

Jon Livesey

January 4th, 2008 8:22pm Report this comment

Let's see. You refer to "the royals and their weird, tax-evading, toe-sucking ways," and we are supposed to believe that you are just some objective honest Joe with no axe to grind, making a TV movie about the Palace?