Well, it’s only taken 20 years of the media daily referring to the Royal Family’s life as “being like a soap” for someone to finally... make a soap about the Royal Family!

Obviously, The Palace doesn’t focus on the real Royal Family. It would probably be slightly more legal to murder the real Royal Family than make a soap about them. Imagine the lawsuits. The lawyers involved would earn roughly the GDP of Canada.

So no – The Palace isn’t about the real Royal Family. Well, not entirely. It might happen to have, as its focus, two young princes – Prince Richard (Rupert Evans) and Prince George (Sebastian Armesto), two Tyrwhitt-shirted yahoos with a predilection for champagne and yuppie clubs. It might be set in a Buckingham Palace stuffed with gossipy gay retainers, all pitched against one another, depending on who their master or mistress is. There might even be confessional televised interviews, secret affairs and mental health problems.

But in this world, Prince Richard – the one who’s a bit like Prince William – has a contender for his role as monarch. It’s his old sister – Big Suze (Sophie Winkleman) from Peep Show.She’s more dutiful, looks better in a frock, and makes Machiavelli look like Anne Hathaway’s cloud-brained character in The Princess Diaries 2. When the stuffy old king dies, six minutes in, and sexy Prince Richard becomes King Richard IV, Big Suze immediately starts plotting against him. In this, she is greatly aided by Richard not being at a homeless hostel – as his official schedule reports – at the moment of succession. He was in a nightclub toilet, drunk on ’poo. One phonecall to ITN later, and Big Suze is doing some classic, Dallas-era, “satisfied sexy bitch lady” faces on the Clarence House sofa.

Character and casting-wise, there are some enjoyable choices: Jane Asher is King Richard’s hopelessly repressed, gin-slinging mother – all teary eyes, clutched pearls and wobbly, stockinged legs on the Palace stairs. Imagine an amazing cross between Diana and Camilla. She’s clearly going to go totally crackers before series-end – she looks like she might kill someone with a sceptre, while calmly explaining, “It’s my duty to the King” by episode four. The gays are going to love her.

There’s also another princess, Isabelle – Britain’s first emo princess, dark and intense, and all set to self-harm on the balcony during Trooping the Colour.

Young King Richard himself comes straight from the cast of High School Musical. He’s all puppyish enthusiasm, emotional conflict and hot ass. Given that, in real life, people actually fancy Prince Harry – who looks like Kevin Federline’s pet weasel – the OC/Hollyoaks crowd are going to go thoroughly nuts for Rupert Evans. He had better have some serious shagging around time put aside in his diary. He’s going to need it.

What is odd, though, is how unexpectedly small it all feels. Don’t get me wrong. It’s by no means a failure. But in a year when, thanks to the writers’ strike, America is desperate for British TV shows, I can’t imagine this selling to prime-time there – despite a subject matter of global interest.

It still seems the most that British TV can conceive of aspiring to is a Christmas Day episode of Coronation Street – one in which someone gets married, or dies. Compared with the pace, glitz, twist and power of a big US drama, The Palace sounds like François Truffaut’s querulous five-tone calling signal on Close Encounters of the Third Kind – inevitably blown away by just two notes, should the gigantic, floodlit, intergalactic West Wing hover above it.

Do you know what’s oddest about it all, though? That the real Royal Family will all be watching it. Not the Queen, obviously, or the Duke of Edinburgh – I should imagine that no one has plucked up the courage to tell the Prince of Wales that ITV1 exists, let alone what happens on it. Imagine having to tell him about Joe Pasquale – Return of the Love Monkey. He’d probably shoot you. But Prince Harry will be watching it, won’t he? And Prince William. And Princess Beatrice, round at Kate Moss’s, texting “LULZ” and “ROFL” to Peaches Geldof every time Jane Asher drinks a big gin.

If the real Royal Family are like a soap, it’s not something like this – Coronation, literally, Street – at all. It’s something bizarre, and hysterical, and possibly semi-musical, from Mexico. The kind of thing in which people get killed by bees from Uranus. The Palace, Mon, ITV1, 9pm

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