The BBC apologised to Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday after it implied that she stormed out of a photo shoot with celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz amid a row over her crown. The broadcaster released a snippet from forthcoming documentary "A Year With The Queen" on Wednesday which prompted newspaper headlines such as "Throne A Wobbler" in the Sun tabloid newspaper.
But the BBC said in a statement that the sequence of events had been "misrepresented," creating the false impression that the 81-year-old queen had halted the photo shoot.
In the footage, the monarch and Leibovitz are shown clashing over the photographer's request that she remove her crown at the shoot aat Buckingham Palace in March "I think it will look better without the crown because the garter robe is so...," the footage showed Leibovitz saying, before the queen interrupted her.
"Less dressy? What do you think this is?" the monarch hit back, pointing at the ceremonial robe she was wearing and giving her an icy stare. This was followed by footage of the queen walking down a corridor and telling an official: "I'm not changing anything. I've had enough dressing like this, thank you very much."
But the BBC said that the second part was, in fact, shot when the queen made her way to the sitting, not as she left. They blamed an editing error for the blunder. "In this trailer, there is a sequence that implies that the queen left a sitting prematurely," the BBC said in a statement.
"This was not the case and the actual sequence of events was misrepresented. "The BBC would like to apologise to both the Queen and Annie Leibovitz for any upset this may have caused." On Wednesday, BBC1 controller Peter Fincham had described the scene with Leibovitz as "a very memorable little sequence."