PJ Vogt

Buckingham Palace.

This particular series looked very promising.

A quote, six-part look at the secrets of Buckingham Palace.

The swimming pool.

They go on.

A swimming pool, a doctor's surgery, and a post office.

The royals use cash?

Question for a different episode.

The documentary series starts well before the existence of the swimming pool.

It starts actually with the story of the palace before it was yet the modern palace.

If you traveled back in time 260 years, Buckingham Palace would have looked like this.

We see an exterior shot of a red brick house on a country lane.

Handsome, stately, certainly nicer than your house, but not a palace.

That's because Buckingham Palace didn't start life as a royal residence.

It was originally built as a private house by a man called the Duke of Buckingham.

The private house that our modern Buckingham Palace would be expanded out from, that first came into the royal family in 1761.

In the centuries after, some of England's most notable architects would, in phases, transform this red brick townhouse into the 830,000 square foot behemoth that is there today.

The story of that transformation is unspooled across the series' many installments.

But it begins to dawn on the attentive viewer, as these installments roll on, that even in what has been billed as a six-part expose, the host is clearly locked outside of the palace gates.

The cameras don't film the interiors.