YOU can't beat a good row between the monarchy and the BBC. Usually these tiffs arise after some truly appalling act of disrespect. A newsreader wearing the wrong coloured tie to announce a royal death, perhaps. Or the lack of kow-towing cameras at an ageing Queen's birthday bash.

These last two "lapses" concerned the Queen Mother. Peter Sissons wore a burgundy tie to announce the old dear's passing, oh the horror. Earlier, the BBC had been criticised for not broadcasting the Queen Mother's 100th birthday pageant.

As a republican-inclined licence payer, I was at the time quite happy that the BBC had declined to broadcast whatever dreary procession had been organised for the old Queen Mum. As to the disrespectful neckwear, aren't black ties old-fashioned these days?

Newsreaders always recite a tragic and gloomy scroll of news. They should, by that logic, wear a black tie every day to acknowledge the misery of their trade, rather than only when announcing that an aged royal has popped off.

The recent dispute saw these two British institutions tripping up while trying to be modern.

The BBC caused one of the noisiest rows in ages while launching its BBC1 schedules. The controller of BBC1, Peter Fincham, introduced a trailer for a programme about the celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz snapping The Queen.

In a now-notorious slip, The Queen was shown apparently storming out of a photo-shoot after Liebovitz asked her to remove her crown (in reality a tiara, or so it is said) because it looked "too dressy".

In fact, The Queen had "stormed" into the session, when she was overheard to say: "I've had enough of dressing like this".

As Her Majesty seems, from the pictures, to be wearing a velvet cloak the size of the average carpet, it is possible to sympathise.

The trailer, which was not made for public consumption, had been cynically edited so that The Queen appeared to be storming off, something which did not happen.

In a ratings-mad world, the BBC wants to make an impact to justify its existence, and its public funding. This is fair enough, up to a point, but on this occasion the desire to be noticed ran away with itself - even if this did happen by accident or incompetence, not design.

Many TV programmes are now contracted out to outside producers, which is what happened here. The independent company in question was RDF, makers of Channel 4's Wife Swap (oh, if only just imagine Mrs Windsor of central London swapping roles with a penniless pensioner living in a damp tower-block, with an intolerant, ranting husband hang on, that last detail sounds a bit close to reality).

By outsourcing its programmes, the BBC loses some of its moral authority. It is harder to know what is going on if you haven't made the programme yourself, but paid someone else to do it. Delegation to independent companies has become the modern way, from TV to the railways and the health service, but this does lead to confusion over who is responsible for what.

Much criticism has been flung at the BBC, as it always is on these occasions, by the Beeb-hating commentators in the national newspapers. Yet is The Queen above criticism? Why, for instance, did she feel the need to participate in such a programme? Was it sensible to shed what was left of her mystique in order to be filmed by the makers of Wife Swap?

A good row, but an overheated one - which is often the case when the BBC and Royalty lock foreheads.

Trust in broadcasters is undermined by such rows, following the Blue Peter apology and fine, and Channel 4's phone-line scandal with Richard And Judy.

There was another admission of TV fakery this week. Channel 4 was forced to apologise after admitting that Gordon Ramsay had not caught the sea bass he proudly displayed on The F Word, having apparently just speared it off the Devon coast.

The fish had actually been pronged by a local expert diver, not Ramsay. As Ramsay was shown on screen declaring, with his usual rigorous regard to the finer points of etiquette, that spearing the fish had made him feel "like a ****ing action man", one can only hope that he now feels "like a ****ing great big fool".