And then, along comes a show which makes them look collectively like House of Cards.

Meet The Royals.

This is a very fictional drama about a very fictional "British Royal Family".

It stars Shane Warne's ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley as Queen Helena, someone called Vincent Regan as someone called King Simon and William Moseley and Alexandra Park as their children, Prince Liam and Princess Eleanor.

Helena? Simon? Liam? Eleanor? Where are they getting these names from? They sound like the new family on Neighbours, not the Mountbatten-Windsors.

Chuck in a sneaky uncle - Prince Cyrus, played by Jake Maskall, and a couple of deadbeat cousins, Princess Penelope and Princess Maribal, played by more people you've never heard of, and you've pretty much got the size of it.

Oh America, was the Revolutionary War for nothing?

As you can imagine, this is not a sweeping historical drama commissioned for a channel like HBO or Showtime, or a streaming service like Netflix or Amazon.

The Royals is destined for the E! channel (their exclamation point, not ours).

That's the one away up the dial, where the commercials, the on-air promos, the short-duration packaged clips and the actual television programs are more or less indistinguishable from one another.

The series was unveiled at the Television Critic's Association (TCA) press tour in Los Angeles, a programming showcase in which the US television networks, running the alphabetical gamut from A&E to VH1, unveil new programs to the US media.

There is little doubt that The Royals is intentionally pure camp, though opinion among US television critics seemed divided between whether it was a show which was so bad it was good, or just a show which is so bad that it's actually wretchedly awful.

Its only salvation is the presence of the magnificent Joan Collins as Queen Helena's mother the Grand Duchess of Oxford, who sweeps in wearing what looks like a knock-off of one of the (real) Queen's favourite brooches, The Jardine Star.

 

The only problem is she's sporting an invented title which would hardly pass muster with Debrett's Peerage.

Two small notes for the show's writers: Britain has no Grand Duchies (and consequently no Grand Duchesses) and Oxford's closest claim to the House of Lords was the Earl of Oxford, a title which has been dormant since 1703.

To her credit, Collins wrote the book on vamp. And camp. And she pioneered the trout pout so loved by television villainesses, from Another World's Iris Cory to Sable Colby on The Colbys, and everyone in between.

But even Collins (nee Dynasty's Alexis Morell Carrington Colby Dexter Rowan) looks a little nonplussed by the music video nonsense surrounding her.

And just when you thought things couldn't actually get worse, Hurley, who appeared on stage at the showcase with the cast and producers to promote the series, then compared her role to the late Princess of Wales.

"I thought to myself, what would happen if Princess Diana became Queen of England?" she said. "I took inspiration from the way she dressed and spoke. All little girls dream of being princesses."

Which is odd, because almost everything in the trailer looks like soft-core porn.

"Of course I'm ready, I'm the Queen of England, when am I not ready?" Hurley says in it, sporting a slightly plummy accent which sounds two parts Mrs Slocombe and one part Nigella Lawson.

"I've spent my life cultivating the image of this family," she adds.

If that's true, it's a failure of a life: what follows is a series of images which reveals "this family" to basically be a bunch of bed-hopping halfwits saddled with expressions that look either like constipation or stroke, and very, very lousy dialogue.

Watching the trailer is a little like going through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

It is peppered with lines like "You don't order me around. I'm the princess!" (Kath & Kim should sue) and shocking breaches of protocol, such as a footman declaring to the Queen: "All rise for the Grand Duchess."

If this was the real Buckingham Palace, the hapless nit would be out of a job before you can say the words "The Most Noble Order of the Garter".

Another note for the writers: please Google "Order of Precedence in England and Wales". And read it. And read it again.

In a move which can only be described as ambitious (if not actually foolhardy), the E! channel confirmed they have renewed the series for a second season, two months before the first is set to air on US television.