Palaces of Princess Diana, Henry VIII to star on PBS

• PBS series to focus on lavish estates where Princess Diana and Henry VIII trod
• Americans can indulge their house envy%2C without the massive bills
• Highlights the English talent for building grand palaces

Americans these days can't get enough of grand English palaces (Hello, Downton Abbey), so PBS is planning to serve up more British "house porn" on Sunday nights this summer.

The three one-hour specials, starting June 30 (check local listings), will look at one the great gifts the English have given the world (besides law and literature): great sprawling piles of residential architecture.

The series will look at:

Althorp, the Spencer family estate where 19 generations have lived, including its most famous member, the late Princess Diana, who also is buried there.

Chatsworth, the seat of the dukes of Devonshire, where JFK's older sister Kathleen would have been the Duchess of Devonshire if her aristocrat husband hadn't died in World War II, and she a few years later.

• Hampton Court, the beautiful riverside Renaissance-style palace with the bloody past, where Henry VIII wooed, won, divorced, impregnated or ordered the beheading of some of his six wives.

"What these magnificent estates have in common is not only a rich and immensely entertaining history, but a modern-day context as well," says Robert Strange, an executive producer, in a press release. "In their own ways, each house presents viewers with a living drama that stretches back for centuries yet still plays itself out today."

The specials are being billed as Secrets of Althorp and so on, in keeping with the earlier success on PBS of Secrets of Highclere Castle, which showcased the real castle that serves as the stand-in for fictional Downtown Abbey in that enormously popular series about an aristocratic family trying to hold on to its estate in the early 20th century.

Hampton Court hasn't been occupied by British royals since the 18th century; today, it's a palace museum owned by the nation and a popular destination for tourists in search of the ghosts of old King Harry and his hapless women.

But Althorp and Chatsworth are still owned by their original families, who find it even more difficult to carry on as before in the early 21st century as the fictional denizens of Downtown Abbey did a century ago.

The fact is, these sprawling estates are bloody expensive to run, not least because they're practically falling down around the heads of the inhabitants and need constant costly repairs.

Thus, the need to open the houses to tourists and to rent them out for weddings and conferences, and to run businesses based on the estate such as gift shops and gourmet food shops.

Thus, the need to invite TV cameras in to see how the aristocrats live (or patch the holes in the roof). Thus, their usefulness during pledge weeks on PBS. Chatsworth has already been the subject of several documentaries on PBS about the Devonshires and how they run the estate.

These houses (the word seems inadequate) have been fascinating to Americans for years, certainly since 1985 when Treasure Houses of Britain opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. At the same time, Diana and then-husband Prince Charles arrived for an American tour and visited the exhibit, still the largest ever staged at the National Gallery.