Our top TV put down... Mrs Merton’s Paul Daniels quip

IT was the outrageous question that propelled spoof agony aunt Mrs Merton to national fame.

Her legendary quip to magician’s wife Debbie McGee – ‘So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’ – has now been voted the greatest ever comedy put-down on British television.

The brazen query is from the second episode of The Mrs Merton Show, the 1995 parody chat show created by and starring the late Caroline Aherne, pictured as Mrs Merton. It helped turn the series into a prime time favourite.

It beat a one-liner from Only Fools And Horses – when David Jason as wheeler-dealer Del Boy remarked: ‘Dear old granddad, bless him. He was about as useful as a pair of sunglasses on a bloke with one ear.’

A typically disparaging remark by Edmund Blackadder, directed at dimwitted Baldrick, came third in the survey commissioned for the launch of Blackadder on the on-demand service UKTV Play. In an episode of the fourth and final series of the historical comedy, Blackadder says: ‘Your brain, for example, is so minute, Baldrick, that if a hungry cannibal cracked your head open, there wouldn’t be enough to cover a small water biscuit.’

Bafta-winning writer and actress Miss Aherne was known for creating BBC sitcom The Royle Family but it was her role as the gossiping granny Mrs Merton that first made her a household name.

Miss McGee had barely sat down on the couch when the deceptively mild-mannered presenter asked the startling question about her marriage to the late magician, who was 20 years her senior.

But the former ballet dancer, who was Daniels’ assistant for many years, took it in good humour. She tweeted the famous line in tribute to Miss Aherne, who died of throat cancer aged 52 last year.

Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers and Father Ted also made it into the top ten. But Blackadder was king of the snubs, having four entries in the top 20.