KEY POINTS:
The BBC apologised to Queen Elizabeth yesterday for wrongly implying that she had stormed out of a photo shoot with American photographer Annie Leibovitz.
The British broadcaster blamed a production company for sending it clips edited out of sequence which implied the monarch had lost her temper when asked to remove her crown.
The footage should never have been shown, the BBC said.
The story became headline news after a promotional trailer for a BBC documentary A year with the Queen, due to be aired later this year, was shown to journalists.
"In this trailer there is a sequence that implies that the Queen left a sitting prematurely. This was not the case and the actual sequence of events was misrepresented," the corporation said in a statement.
"The BBC would like to apologise to both the Queen and Annie Leibovitz for any upset this may have caused."
The flap was a further embarrassment for Britain's venerable public broadcaster days after it was ordered to pay an unprecedented 50,000 pound ($NZ131,822) fine for faking a phone-in contest on the 50-year-old children's show Blue Peter.
The BBC is funded by a tax on televisions and its reputation for quality and fairness is highly sensitive.
Queen Elizabeth, being filmed for the behind-the-scenes documentary, was depicted as apparently having flounced out of a room at Buckingham Palace with an aide carrying her robes.
The trailer showed Leibovitz asking the monarch, who had worn her crown and formal robes for the sitting, to remove her crown.
The Queen gave her an icy stare and replied: "Less dressy, what do you think this is?", pointing to her outfit.
The footage that followed showed the queen walking briskly down a corridor, telling her staff: "I'm not changing anything. I've had enough dressing like this thank you very much."
The footage which appeared to show her storming out was actually filmed earlier as she made her way to the sitting.
A BBC spokeswoman later blamed the production company, RDF Media Group for supplying the footage out of sequence.
"At the time of the press conference yesterday, the controller of BBC One was not aware that those clips had been edited out of sequence.
"They were supplied in that sequence to the BBC by the independent production company making the film. So in good faith we actually thought that was the sequence."
- REUTERS
