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Anyone who's packed the station wagon for a family vacation recognizes the mundane suffering of the day, the nuisance of having to remember toys and books, drinks and pillows. When Britain's royal household moves temporarily from London to Scotland, the ritual is a bit more elaborate, the cargo more eclectic: There are paper towels and ancient silver spoons, potato chips and a knighting stool. Yes, a knighting stool, packed in bubble wrap. In case a mere mister needs to become a sir, pronto.

Thank goodness the royal household has a man in charge of the job, the yeoman of logistics (commonly known in most families as "Mom"). He's the baggage-and-travel man, but he is not alone in holding an odd title. Buckingham Palace also employs the yeoman of the plate pantry and the yeoman of the glass and china pantry. Surely the plum (or grape) job of them all is held by the yeoman of the cellars.

"I know," says veteran royal correspondent Robert Hardman, who encountered all these characters in the course of a year. "It's very odd, isn't it?" Mr. Hardman is the author of A Year with the Queen and made the documentary that accompanied it, a program that proved highly controversial in Britain even before it aired and led, circuitously, to the resignation of a top executive at the BBC. But more on that later, as the yeoman of storytelling might say.

Mr. Hardman was the royal reporter for the Daily Telegraph for 10 years, a period when the press kept their eyes on the big stories. They were interested in the young princes, the late Princess of Wales, state dinners and scandals, not the visits to hospices by minor royals or the hundreds of ribbons cut and rubber chicken eaten.

"I realized that people had lost sight of what the monarchy actually does," Mr. Hardman says over lunch at a London restaurant. He had already made a loving documentary (there's also a book) in 2005 about the monarch's home at Windsor, called The Queen's Castle. This time, he told them, he was interested in the family business.

"There was no agenda, no audit, we weren't setting out to say, 'Are they good value or not?' " Mr. Hardman says. "And we didn't have a presenter chucking a microphone in their faces. It's old-fashioned observation documentary."

Mr. Hardman's observation yielded a collection of tiny details that revealed a singular and bizarre organism. Who knew, for example, that "food always tastes cold on a gold plate," as revealed by one lady-in-waiting, or that the Queen's sheets need to be washed four times before she stays in a hotel? That the Scots hoover up much more food than the English do at royal garden parties? That there's a retired insurance broker in Berkshire who has logged every single royal engagement since 1979 (almost 4,000 events in 2006 alone)?

All went swimmingly until the documentary's BBC launch last summer. That's when RDF Media, the company that produced A Year with the Queen, supplied a promotional trailer suggesting that an irritated Queen had stormed out of a session with American photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Reporters shown the clip at a BBC launch went on terrier alert: Was it possible that the monarch had had a snit fit? The story flashed around the world, but it seemed too good to be true, and it was. The footage had been edited out of sequence - the Queen's annoyance had occurred before the shoot; she had not stormed out on anyone.

The fiasco sent the broadcaster on a bout of soul searching, and led to the resignation of Peter Fincham, controller of BBC One. In the end, the decision was made to air the documentary; it has also been broadcast on CBC in Canada and ABC in the United States.

The interesting thing about the Leibovitz kerfuffle is that it was hardly the most intriguing part of the project. The Queen, in fact, gets exasperated on another occasion, when Prince Philip is meant to be bringing the President of Ghana and his wife to a state dinner (they get stuck in one of Buckingham Palace's decrepit elevators). "Lift's down!" the Queen says. "What a life!"

The Queen's attention to detail, the subtlety of her influence and her iron grip on all facets of royal life surprised Mr. Hardman. He sat in on one meeting with the Queen and Gordon Brown, at which the Prime Minister talked about investing in helicopters for the armed forces. "It would be good if the helicopters we bought actually could work," replied the monarch. This was more than a year before her grandson Prince Harry was deployed to Afghanistan.

Despite its odd rituals, some of which seem straight out of Gormenghast, the monarchy's chief asset, Mr. Hardman believes, is its ability to evolve, adapt and change while preserving a steady hand holding the tea cup. Allowing Brian May of the band Queen to play the national anthem on the roof of Buckingham Palace would have been unthinkable even a few decades ago. Mr. Hardman says the role of the young princes - who have been allowed to plow a sometimes crooked furrow - stands in contrast to that of their father, whose life was decided "by a committee that included the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury."

He points out that there have been only 40 British monarchs since the Norman conquest (give or take a disputed few), while there are countries that have had that many governments since the end of the Second World War.

While Mr. Hardman may not have set out to answer the question of the monarchy's value for money, it is inescapable, especially in these market-obsessed times. "Look at it this way," he says. "It's a tamper-proof form of government. You can't buy your way in. It's the ultimate lottery."