BBC1 controller Peter Fincham has admitted he is not sure if the documentary that sparked the "Crowngate" row with Buckingham Palace will actually be broadcast.
"I certainly hope that we will screen the series, a lot of talking is going on in the background - I can't say whether or not the Queen will see it before it goes up, because I don't know," he said, speaking at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival.
Asked whether the documentary will take its promised place in the autumn schedule, he answered "nothing is definite at all".
"I hope and believe we will run it," he added, but could not give a definitive answer.
Mr Fincham found himself plunged into the current crisis in confidence in TV when it emerged that footage he had trumpeted to the press at the BBC1 autumn launch last month as showing the Queen walking out of a photoshoot "in a huff", gave a misleading interpretation of events.
"I trusted the footage, I had no reason not to trust the footage," he said in Edinburgh.
The incident is still under investigation but he added "I had every reason to believe I was accurately describing what I was showing". "I am quite confident that I acted in good faith," Mr Fincham said.
Crowngate, as the episode became known, came just as the BBC was fined £50,000 for faking a competition winner on Blue Peter, creating the impression of an organisation in crisis. It also added to the wave of scandals - many involving deception in phone-in competitions - that has hurt public trust in the medium this year.
With that background, Mr Fincham said "we always come to Edinburgh in a mood of self-examination," as an industry, but this time there is also a healthy dose of "self-reproach that is common across TV".
"Not all of TV is broken, not all of the BBC is broke," he added. "I am enough of an optimist to believe good will come out of this".
He added that the industry is likely to look back on 2007 and say "that was a bit of a turning point, that was a wake-up call for TV".
Now the industry must "to look at the way it does things and look at the audience's assumptions about what it is doing".
"What we may not have spent enough time doing... is considering things from the audience's point of view," Mr Fincham said.
When historians examine the past decade in TV, reality TV is likely to have been one of its defining formats, but Mr Fincham suggested that trend may be drawing to an end.
"Are we on the turn with reality TV?" he asked. "Has the centre of gravity of a certain sort of TV shifted a little bit from that back to Saturday night TV?" he added, pointing out that X Factor has returned with high ratings while Big Brother has suffered.
The Queen footage was provided by RDF Media and the scandal has cast doubt on the BBC's further use of independent production houses.
But Mr Fincham seemed to give them hope, saying: "We're in the same boat together, the boat may have sprung a few leaks but we are in the boat together. The boat is TV."
