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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Courtney Pochin

Queen's 'favourite' TV show that she liked so much she could recite one-liners from it

Members of the Royal Family lead pretty different lives from the rest of us, so it's only natural that we would be curious about their more mundane habits and activities, such as whether they watch the same TV shows as we do.

And it seems their television preferences aren't so wildly different from most.

Prince Harry has recently claimed in his new memoir Spare that William and Kate were big fans of Meghan Markle's show Suits and the Duke of Sussex also admitted that he had watched and fact-checked Netflix's The Crown.

But his late grandmother's choice of favourite show was a little more unexpected.

The Queen's favourite show was said to be The Kumars at No. 42 (BBC)
She especially liked the grandma character (BBC)

In a piece for The New Statesman, journalist Phil Jones claims that back in 2001 the Queen told him all about her favourite show during a visit to Buckingham Palace.

He said he'd kept their conversation a secret for 21 years as he'd previously been told that journalists shouldn't reveal their discussions with the monarch.

But as he was leaving BBC Radio 2, he decided it was finally time to divulge what he had learned.

The show in question? The Kumars at No. 42.

And he claims Her Majesty was such a big fan of the programme that she could even "recite some of the one-liners" from it.

The comment was reportedly made to Phil Jones during a visit to Buckingham Palace in 2001 (Getty Images)

Jones wrote: "In 2001 I was invited to a media function at Buckingham Palace.

"We chatted for ages, which I can tell you is rather surreal. My brain kept saying, 'Bloody hell I’m talking to the Queen and I can’t think of a single thing to say!'

"In the end, I alighted on, 'What’s your favourite programme?' Straightaway, she said, 'The Kumars at No. 42 ' and, even more astonishingly, proceeded to recite some of the one-liners from the grandma character, played by the brilliant Meera Syal."

Jones added that The Queen also shared that she was a big fan of Terry Wogan during their conversation.

However, he says this didn't come as much of a surprise at the time, as he already knew she liked to listen to Radio 2.

The Kumars at No. 42 was a British television show that ran from 2001 to 2006, spanning seven seasons.

The programme starred Sanjeev Bhaskar as Sanjeev Kumar, an aspiring chat show host who had celebrity guest over to his house to talk to them.

All would start to go wrong when Sanjeev's family started to interrupt the conversations, with the celebs ending up chatting more with his mother, father and grandmother.

A six-episode revival series of the show was also made in 2014 and aired on Sky, following divorced Sanjeev and his family who now lived in a flat above their gift shop (No. 42B).

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