Emily Maitlis has said she channelled DCI Kate Fleming from police drama Line of Duty as she grilled Prince Andrew in his car-crash TV interview.
The BBC Newsnight presenter, 49, said she wanted to use the “forensic approach” of Vicky McClure’s anti-corruption cop.
The chat last November, in which she tackled Andrew on sex allegations and his friendship with paedo Jeffrey Epstein, has won two Royal Television Society Awards.
Emily said: "I was channelling DCI Kate Fleming. There’s something so calmly forensic about the way she does it.
"It’s unemotional, calm, quiet, but you know she’s done her homework.
"That was what I wanted. I’d have shown myself up if I’d got dates wrong, names wrong, said something he’d had to contradict because I’d mixed things up".
The interview was a PR disaster for the Duke, 60, who has denied all allegations against him.
His bizarre comments included insisting he could not have been a sweaty man his sex accuser told of being in a club with because “an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War, when I was shot at” meant he could not sweat.
Emily, speaking on the Table Manners podcast, said it was prompted by her telling of her own love of a rush.
She said: “I am quite adrenaline-driven. I am fascinated by adrenaline. Weirdly, that is what I said to him when he said, ‘I must tell you about why I don’t sweat because of the adrenaline’. I said ‘I am fascinated about adrenaline’.
"Then he told me about the no sweating thing.
“I thought I hated it [adrenaline] and now I have had to recognise it is a part of what I do and what I need. I know I need my highs and know I have to expect my lows.
“So there are crashes but all that is done away from the cameras and away from the interview. I try not to bring that into work.”
The full interview is on the new episode of Jesse Ware’s Table Manners podcast.
