The trick of Stephen Frears and Peter Morgan’s The Queen was to convince us that life in the Buck House (and Balmoral) was exactly as depicted. The Palace (ITV1) insists that it is no more a dramatisation of the home life of our own dear queen than Antony and Cleopatra was the Queen Victoria story on the Nile. It is something much sexier. When Tony Greaves’s eight-part comedy-drama began last night there was a king on the throne and lest we consider this a mere projection into the reign of Charles III, this king has sired four grown-up children. We are in an alternative universe comparable to The West Wing’s where Democrats permanently inhabit the White House and the Americans are sowing world peace.

The comparison ends there for Aaron Sorkin’s series was more interested in political than sexual machinations and infused with a sense of the public good. The Palace, although searching for a similar claustrophobia within a cavernous building, is scurrilous from the off. The monarchy as an agent of a higher moral good is not in the script. As an aide tells Prince Richard as she gets him out of a night at the opera: “Helping you shirk your responsibilities is what I was born to do.”

Richard (a likeable Rupert Evans) and his more reckless brother George (a brilliant frat movie performance from Sebastian Armesto) are soon off partying in a Sloaney club, but this is Richard’s last shirk. For the Wagner – dismissed by George as “a fat bird singing the same line again and again” – has literally killed the king. Prince Richard is now Richard IV.

Every relationship is transformed. A footman announcing his mother’s presence goes: “Your majesty. Her majesty, your majesty.” But it is the change in the siblings’ pecking order that matters. Thanks to primogeniture, the late king’s oldest, the publicity hungry Princess Eleanor, has lost out to her little brother and she finds the idea of “Rich” opening Parliament laughable. The plot here has a lot of work to do if it is to make any sense of Eleanor’s thwarted ambition leading to a palace coup. The constitution stands in the way. Happily, Sophie Winkleman’s Eleanor possesses a sorcerer’s charm that makes you think her capable of anything.

Her fears for Richard’s competence are soon born out when he calls in a girlfriend to “comfort” him on the throne. “King Dick” scream the tabloids. Eleanor thinks the people will burn them at the stake. “That’s witches,” her mother explains: “They cut off our heads.” “With Eleanor, they’d probably have to do both,” observes the young Princess Poppy.

In a desperate attempt to save himself, Richard resorts to patriotism and sincerity during a live TV interview. “Most days I feel like a little boy, a fool. But I love my country and whether it is in Cardiff, Edinburgh or divining over the Pennines, I have this incredible buzz. I could not be more proud and I hope one day to be able to repay the favour.” The country, naturally, forgives him. Now he just has to survive a PA leaking to the press, the below-stairs queens loyal to the ancien regime, the press hunt for his girlfriend (who works for the Prime Minister). And Eleanor.

My reviewing tag team partner, Tim Teeman, was unimpressed by Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach in ITV1’s 9pm slot last Thursday, but I am delighted that, as with The Palace, the channel is setting before us something other than a grim regional detective or a comedy drama about suburban adultery. The Palace inhabits an incredible world all of its own. In that respect it is believable: the real palace undoubtedly does, too.

Applause, too, to Channel 4 for finding a new form of police procedural in City of Vice. It takes the unlikely but true premise that the novelist Henry Fielding and his blind brother John set up London’s original detective force, the Bow Street Runners. Unfortunately their first case, the rape and murder of a prostitute who had figured in Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies (reissued two years ago in loo-book format, incidentally), was too easily solved to be gripping and the relationship between Ian McDiarmid as Henry and Iain Glen as John did not really get going. The first episode, which combined computer graphics for the outside with gritty filming of interior scenes, was certainly, however, an antidote to the current spate of twee costume dramas. I felt it doing me good.

Out of the box

— Echo Beach and Moving Wallpaper won their slots in their first outing last Thursday on ITV1. Each drew around five million viewers, well above ITV1's average for that time. But the BBC is not making things easy for ITV as it finds treats to lure us into the new News at Ten. Last night it faced the Mel Gibson film Signson BBC Two and the channel NEVER shows Hollywood movies on Monday nights.

— Doctor Who should be called The Regeneration Game, its doctors and assistants come and go at such a pace. The latest victim is dear old Airfix which is bringing out some Doctor Who models for us to glue together. Unable to keep up, it has modelled the Time Lord’s companion Martha, who has just been replaced by Donna.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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