Camilla's throne

Here's a woman looking remarkably like Camilla Parker Bowles. She's trying out the royal throne for size while she sips whisky and reveals a bit too much of her knickers.

Beside her bare feet, the coronation crown and sceptre lie on the floor.

After all the bad publicity in the weeks before their impending nuptials, the picture is the last thing Charles and Camilla need. Luckily for them, the scene is not real.

It comes from a spoof Channel 4 documentary series to be screened next week in the runup to Friday's wedding.

Behind the series is Baftawinning artist Alison Jackson, famous for her snaps of celebrity lookalikes and BBC2 spin-off series Double Take.

In other scenes to be broadcast, the 57-year-old future Princess Consort practises her regal wave and rifles through a selection of the crown jewels - as if giving the lie to claims that she has no desire ever to become Queen.

The short films, dubbed Not The Royal Wedding and produced and directed by Jackson, will be broadcast each night next week at 7.55pm after the Channel 4 evening news.

And a half-hour special will be broadcast on Friday 8 April at

11.05pm - after the real-life Windsor Guildhall ceremony.

They claim to show "candid" footage of the preparations for the nuptials "as filmed secretly by a Channel 4 reporter who has been undercover in the royal palaces for the past month".

Bizarre mocked-up scenes will include covert footage of Camilla's "wild hen night", a fly-on-the-wall insight into Charles's "personal grooming habits" and "revelations about what the Queen and Prince Philip really think of it all".

Royal officials will be hoping for a more reverent approach to the wedding elsewhere next week. They have suffered a series of embarrassments since the Evening Standard first broke news of the wedding, culminating in Charles's gaffe at Klosters yesterday when he described the media as "those bloody people".

It was initially announced that the wedding would be a civil service inside Windsor Castle. The venue was switched to the register office at the nearby Guildhall after it was discovered the castle was not licensed for weddings - and that, if it were, members of the public would also be entitled to marry there.

It then emerged that the public would also have the right to attend the Guildhall ceremony - and the Queen announced that, in a bid to keep the ceremony "low-key", she would not be attending.

Last week, Prince Philip also said he might not be back from a foreign trip in time to attend.