It’s Not Good Business To Upset The Queen

The independent program maker RDF Media has learned the hard way it is not good business to portray the Queen in a manner that’s not true, and embarrass the public broadcaster at the same time.

Not that there has been a public word from Buckingham Palace criticizing the trailer RDF provided to the BBC promoting this fall’s upcoming “A Year With the Queen” documentary. The offending scene showed the queen allegedly angrily storming out of a photo shoot with American photographer Annie Leibovitz when in fact the video was actually of her walking to the photo shoot.

Showing that trailer caused the BBC plenty of embarrassment at a time it already had enough embarrassments on its hand. The public broadcaster apologized to the palace, RDF, after not saying anything for a while when the mess first surfaced, then apologized to the BBC and to the palace, and then the BBC Trustees (basically its corporate board) apologized to the palace.

With the apologies out of the way the daggers within the UK broadcast industry are plunging into RDF. First, the BBC said it was suspending all commissions from RDF until the public broadcaster completes an internal inquiry, expected sometime in September, into the exact causes of how the misleading footage got shown.

And now ITV, the largest commercial broadcaster, said it was doing the same – suspending business with RDF until the results and recommendations from the BBC inquiry are announced.  ITV accounts for around 11% of RDF’s annual revenue.

Michael Grade, ITV’s chairman and former BBC director-general, has been pontificating to broadcasters lately about recent phone-in scandals – results faked by TV producers -- so ITV says the RDF suspension should be seen in the light of cleaning up the television business. ITV says it wants to ensure that the Queen problems won’t happen with any other RDF program.

The London stock market nailed RDF shares for a couple of days tumbling them nearly 20%, but apparently the share watchers thought it was a bit overdone and the shares were making a comeback on Monday.- July 24, 2007

Keywords:BBC, independent television production

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