Mon Jan 22, 10:03 AM
LONDON (AFP) - The 1995 interview of Britain's princess Diana was voted the most memorable of all time, topping the 1977 post-Watergate talk with Richard Nixon, a survey of television viewers has found.
Diana, princess of Wales, told Martin Bashir for BBC's Panorama programme that "there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded," referring to then-estranged husband Prince Charles' relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, whom he finally married in 2005.
A poll of 3,000 viewers commissioned for the UKTV Gold channel voted the interview with Diana, who died in a Paris car crash in 1997, as the most memorable of all time.
It ranks ahead of Sir David Frost's 1977 interview with former US president Nixon who admitted having let his country down in the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation.
The grilling, which drew the largest audience ever for a news interview, has been immortalised in the West End play "Frost/Nixon".
Late Northern Ireland and Manchester United football legend George Best's drunken appearance on the BBC in 1990, when he stunned the audience by swearing during the live broadcast, came third.
The BBC's tough interviewer Jeremy Paxman took fourth place for asking Michael Howard, who was running for the Conservative Party leadership in 1997, the same question 12 times about his involvement in the suspension of a top prison governor.
The punk rock band Sex Pistols' expletive-fuelled appearance on the BBC Today show, which made front page news the following day, completes the top five.
Among other favourites is the interview that British actor Hugh Grant gave in 1995 on the US programme "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno", after being caught in a comprising position with prostitute Divine Brown. It ranked seventh.