Quiz queen Judith Keppel has retired from 'Eggheads'

Judith Keppel has announced her retirement from TV quiz show Eggheads after nearly 20 years on screen.

The quizzing queen, 80, first joined Eggheads in 2003 when it was at the BBC and has stuck with the show through a move to Channel 5, but will not appear in the new series which begins today (Monday).

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On her decision to leave the quiz show, which she has starred in since it began, Keppel told PA: “I love doing it, but I have done it for 19 years and my memory is definitely not what it was.”

Eggheads sees teams of contestants try to beat a panel of specialist quizzers in a test of their general knowledge.

Keppel was chosen as one of the pro quizzers after becoming the first person ever to win the million-pound jackpot in the UK version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in 2000.

On her “difficult” decision to leave Eggheads, she said: “I have done it for 19 years and I’m quite old. I had a sort of horrible decade birthday the other day (she turned 80 in August) and I have noticed that I can’t learn as well as I did.

“So I just thought it was time to go.”

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The TV quiz star, who is a distant relative of the Queen Consort, said doing Eggheads had been “great fun”.

Her fellow Eggheads panellist Kevin Ashman, who has been a fixture on the show since 2003, said: “We’ll miss Judith terribly.

“She brought a real touch of class to proceedings… I remember one team coming to set and they had a spreadsheet of our strengths and weaknesses.

“Judith they had identified as good at history, arts, books, as you’d expect, but they’d also put her down for ‘posh stuff’ whatever that category covers.”

Another of the Eggheads, Chris Hughes, said: “Judith was great fun as a teammate, with a real sense of the ridiculous. If she found something funny she would just start giggling.

“I asked her out for afternoon tea once, and after our third pot of tea she carefully wrapped up her smoked salmon sandwich and chocolate brownie and stashed them away in her handbag.”

The show’s host, Jeremy Vine, said: “I think for all of us it’s sad, she was my great buddy in the studio, because she used to always sit next to me and we would spend most of the time laughing.”

He added: “Judith is genuinely TV quiz royalty. Because she’s, in Britain, the only woman ever to have won Millionaire, and the first person ever to have won the million.

“So she’s got those two things, that’s how we all discovered her, the whole country discovered Judith Keppel at the same instant which is a very powerful thing and actually she’s such an interesting person, you know, over the years I’ve got to know her… we are genuinely friends.”

Eggheads returns to Channel 5 on 10 October at 6.30pm.