Wallis And Edward (ITV1)

Queen Mary wasn't impressed with son and heir Edward's choice of girlfriend. "I'm told she paints her fingernails," she said with a look of disdain as though someone had thrown up in her shoes.

It would never do to have a woman who decorated her digits sitting next to the man on the throne, would it?

The Queen was participating in TV's current infatuation with royal romances. The courtship of Charles and Camilla follows in Whatever Love Means after Christmas. For starters, there was Wallis And Edward, the story of the abdication crisis caused after Edward was told he couldn't wed Wallis Simpson because she was twice-divorced, although I reckon the royals just didn't want an American in the family.

Far from the usual portrait of Mrs Simpson as a cold, calculating woman, this offered a more sympathetic portrait. "If life offers you this, why refuse it?," she asked as the crown came tantalisingly close.

Edward was besotted and she knew a good thing when she saw one. Here it was suggested that she offered to give him up for the sake of the country.

Prime Minister Baldwin came up with a solution enabling the king to have his cake and eat it. "A respectable whore twice a week" was acceptable, but marrying a divorced woman was unthinkable.

Edward took his duties seriously, having a word with the Minister of Labour about unemployment in the North, and trying to get out and about more to meet the common folk.

Of course, the spin doctors went into overdrive to (a) stop the story appearing in British newspapers and (b) spread rumours about Wallis's life. One of the more absurd whispers concerned rumours of an illegitimate child by Ribbentrop being brought up by nuns in Bournemouth.

Legally, it was said, he could marry whomsoever he wanted as long as she wasn't a Catholic.

"I've never been so happy in all my life as I am now," said the king, forgetting that a monarch's job is to be miserable. He had to be reminded that he's not like other men. "You are not a man, sir, you are a king," he was told.

Baldwin just couldn't get to grips with the prospect of Queen Wallis. The very thought of a Queen of England with three living husbands, even if she had divorced two of them, was out of the question.

Wallis And Edward made an entertaining drama out of a constitutional crisis with a fun-loving Wallis from Joely Richardson (despite being a foot too tall for the part) and Stephen Campbell Moore as the man born to be king.

While it didn't shed any new light on the story, it did review the situation with a certain amount of style. You couldn't help but feel sorry not for Edward having to give up the throne, but for Bertie having to take his place. "Sorry to drop you in it," Edward apologised, rather selfishly under the circumstances.

He was under the illusion that the Windsors would come round in the end and welcome them back into the family. He was blinded by love to the realities of royal life.