If television is the idiot's lantern then the subjective opinions of someone unqualified to write about television must surely be the idiot's lectern.

The Palace

ITV, 9pm Mondays

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been enjoying the third and fourth seasons of The West Wing on DVD. It’s one of those shows which takes a while to get into but once you’ve got everything and everyone sussed out – and Wiki’ed a few technical details – you can more or less follow what is unfolding on your screen at a hundred miles an hour. Some have touted ITV’s new series "The Palace" as a sort of British version of the West Wing set above and below stairs at Buckingham Palace. Instead of a President and his staff we have the King and his staff. It’s one of those ideas which initially strikes you as a "why has no one done this before?"

The Palace is by no means bad. Its debut episode starts with the young princes shirking their responsibility to go to the opera and instead sneaking out to a night club to drink too much and be as irresponsible as two young men with a retinue of bodyguards can possibly be. One of the guards gets an urgent message. The King is dead. Long live the new King. Suddenly this young and vaguely carefree young chap is King Richard IV. He becomes King in a nightclub toilet - how very modern.

The problem with touting The Palace as a new West Wing is that there is a fundamental difference between the White House and Buckingham Palace. What goes on in the White House is important, what goes on at Buck House is not. The White House (by which I mean the West Wing version rather than the Bush version) is buzzing with ideology, policy, intellectual arguments, the practical government of America, solving foreign policy disasters, dealing with terrorist threats and all the things which eventually filter down into the lives of everyone. Buckingham Palace is full of silent men laying improbably long tables for improbably long dinners. The new King has to meet the Prime Minister and foreign dignitaries but it’s entirely for show. The Prime Minister prostrates himself in the prescribed manner but that is all – there is no discussion of anything important.

The new King is understandably devastated by the loss of his father and asks a close friend to join him for a late night sob at the Palace. One thing leads to another and the two of them share an embrace on what is referred to as the throne but looks too plain to be anything other than a day to day throne. He’s probably got a best throne in another room. And there’s the one at Westminster – that’s awfully regal. Anyway, he’s snogging this posh bird and one of the younger servants spies them doing so. He tells his ghastly friends in the servants’ quarters and rumour builds upon rumour until it is leaked to the Sun that he was shagging the girl senseless for seven hours on most of the significant chairs in his newly earned kingdom.

Meanwhile, his sister – played by Big Suze from Peep Show and occasionally played as Big Suze from Peep Show – has decided she wants to be Queen. She has a point – she’s the eldest child and would’ve succeeded had she not been a mere female. The tabloid scum feasting on her brother’s alleged shagfest is good news for her. She and her sidekick are the panto villains of the piece thus far and look as if they might make an entertaining moustache-twirling double act over the next few weeks.

The one member of staff that the new King can rely on is his personal assistant (I’m sure she has a grander title but that’s really what she is) played by Zoë Telford. I fancy Zoë Telford something rotten and feel obliged, in the interests of full disclosure, to say so. There were one or two moments in "Teachers" where we saw that she has possibly the most kissable tummy on television. Anyway, her character – Abigail – is also slowly betraying the King as she’s writing an exposé with a tabloid scum hack which she hopes will net her massive quantities of cash.

In an effort to kill the stories about him, the King decides on a live television interview in which he faces questions from a hard nosed reporter. Everyone thinks he’s mad – his aides think he’s made, the Prime Minister thinks he’s mad and his family think he’s mad. He does ok – his sister arranges for some damaging information to be fed to the interviewer but this just spurs the King into a madly patriotic speech which almost certainly wins the public over to his drunken and irresponsible side.

It sounds worse than it was – it is extremely well made (albeit in Lithuania because it costs far too much to make England look like England these days) with grand rooms, sweeping motorcades and the gloss of Hollywood about it. The production clearly has one eye on the international market and feels like a foreigner’s version of the British monarchy. But maybe that’s just what happens when the people writing it have grown up learning about the royal family from tabloids and tearful Diana tributes. Touting it as a British version of the West Wing was a mistake (and one which may only have been made by the press jumping to conclusions). This is a royal soap opera and nothing more. Aside from the King there are no truly likable characters – they’re all either scheming or snobbish – and the family backstabbing is only just beginning.

Perhaps the one thing it does have in common with the West Wing is that the West Wing gives us the President we wish had been elected and the Palace gives us the King we wish we had. There are those who believe that a young, dynamic, open and in-touch-with-his-feelings King is just what the monarchy needs to move into the twenty first century. What they actually mean is that a King who doubles up as a soap opera is what the lower end of the public wants the monarch to be. For the next couple of months we’ll get a pretty good idea of what that would be like. Let's just hope it doesn't spur a series of public discussions about the role of the monarchy because most people don't know what they're talking about and I find them annoying.