For those who didn’t see the splendid five-part BBC documentary Monarchy: The Royal Family At Work, Amazon has the DVD out tomorrow, Monday.

Amazon.co.uk is offering a 40pc reduction at a value price of only £14 (around $27).

The documentary was shot by RDF Media for the BBC and caused a furore at the press launch when the Queen was said to have “stormed out in a huff” from a photoshoot with American star photographer, Annie Leibovitz. The footage actually showed her walking briskly into the session.

Some very senior executives lost their jobs in both RDF and the BBC before the matter was finally resolved and a re-edited version agreed with Buckingham Palace.

The scene — now shown in the correct sequence — is the first to be shown in Episode 1 of the series.

If you are at all interested in British Royalty — and you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t — this is a must have collectors’ item. The DVD also has a bonus of half an hour of unbroadcast material, so contains around six hours of truly sumptuous viewing.

Let’s hope the extra footage has been cut in the right order.

The Queen’s lawyers are starting the process of suing RDF, the media company that made the BBC documentary, A Year With The Queen, and reassembled it in the wrong order. The impression was given that the Queen had stormed out of a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz after she was asked to take off her “crown” — in reality a tiara.

The lawyers have concluded that the film trailer was defamatory, as Royal Anecdotes suggested at the time, and the way is now clear for action against RDF Media.

It’s believed the Queen’s lawyers will wait for the BBC’s report into the incident, currently being prepared by Will Wyatt, before deciding what action to take against the Corporation.

The Palace has been involved in “heated” discussions with the BBC to force it to scrap the documentary altogether. So far the BBC has resisted the pressure, but all now hangs on Wyatt’s report.

The legal action is a shrewd move by courtiers. Public organizations like the BBC often use investigations of this kind to push decisions into the future when the public will have forgotten what all the fuss was about.

It seems the Queen is taking Royal Anecdotes’ advice on the controversial BBC film, A Year With The Queen, in which she is shown apparently storming out from a photoshoot with starry American snapper, Annie Leibovitz. In fact the footage was taken of her arrival at the session.

Regular readers may recall our reaction : “… the Queen should remove permission for the film to be shown.”

The MoS is reporting, “Well placed sources say a heated behind-the-scenes dispute is going on between the BBC and Buckingham Palace over the Corporation’s refusal to scrap the documentary.”

Let’s hope the Palace is successful. The trailer was an outrage and was clearly remixed for sensation rather than accuracy. The attempt may falter though because the documentary series has already been sold to a broadcaster in the USA, and to other countries.

Royal programming on British TV is now big business. A trawl through the listings for the coming week alone reveals four shows on Royal themes across the networks :

Sunday (today) — BBC1, The Great British Village Show has Prince Charles and Camilla handing out prizes at a typical summer competition for the best-kept village.

Monday — Channel 5, Diana: Last Days Of A Princess, a drama-documentary in which actors play the parts of the principals over those final few days.

Tuesday — Channel 5, Charles and Di — The Wedding: Revealed, which promises to tell all about the wedding of the century back in 1981.

Tuesday — ITV1, Guarding The Queen, an excellent and often hilarious documentary series about how young Grenadier Guards are trained for ceremonial and guard duties at Buckingham Palace — in between painful interludes in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.

And that’s just three day’s worth. Television is going large on Royalty at the moment. It remains the greatest fairy tale around.

RDF Media, the production company that made the TV series A Year With The Queen for the BBC has accepted blame for the doctored footage in which the Queen was falsely accused of storming out of a sitting with photographer Annie Leibovitz. (See story here and here.)

RDF’s chief executive David Frank said the company was “guilty of a serious error of judgment”. In an email to BBC director-general Mark Thompson, he offered an unreserved apology to the Queen and to the BBC, which then released a copy of the email exchange.

Frank condemned the act of “manipulating the chronology of any footage” and the behaviour of RDF employees in this case. The Royal row had been “an extremely painful lesson for those involved”, he added.

“Painful” is not enough, though.

It’s a centuries-old tradition that heads must roll when the Monarch is traduced.