Dame Helen Mirren prompted TV presenters to apologise to viewers after she said it “pissed with rain”.

The star, who turned 70 on Sunday, was telling a story about a camping trip she had with her ex-boyfriend, Hollywood star Liam Neeson, when she used the bad language.

Warning: there is swearing in the below video as Dame Helen slips up on morning telly.

Speaking on Good Morning Britain, she said: “I love camping and I still do and I miss camping, my husband unfortunately doesn’t want to camp… I went camping with an ex-boyfriend of mine, Liam Neeson. I lived with him for four years and we went camping in Cornwall.

“He loved camping as well and we had this little deux chevaux car, Liam six foot four in this deux chevaux car, his head was sticking out the top of the car really and we had our tent in the back and all our stuff and our little stove… and we get down there and we’re camping in this tiny tent, all six foot four of Liam and me and we camp in this field – not like official camping site with electricity and loos and showers – none of that just literally a field, and it pissed with rain non stop for like three days.”

Helen Mirren appears on stage as The Queen at the Broadway opening night curtain call of The Audience in 2015
Dame Helen appears on stage as The Queen at the Broadway opening night curtain call of The Audience in 2015 (Greg Allen/AP)

The show’s co-host Ben Shephard immediately said: “Oh. We should apologise. We can’t say things like that first thing in the morning… One of those moments when you put your foot in your mouth. Apologies.”

Dame Helen then asked: “Why can’t you say that?”

Shephard’s co-presenter Kate Garraway then said: “Can we have that debate another time otherwise we’ll get fired? We’ll get fired. You might be the Queen, but you can’t save us.”

During the interview, Dame Helen also said she finds the “fascination” with her age and beauty regime “boring”.

But the star said she accepts it as “part and parcel” of her job.

Asked how she finds the interest that there is in her, her age and her beauty regime, Dame Helen said: “It’s boring. It’s boring.”

Pressed on whether she understands the fascination with it, she replied: “No, I don’t understand your fascination with it. And I don’t think you have a fascination with it. I think you’re saying what your editor told you to say.”

She added: “I just take it as part and parcel as my job. And it is.”

Dame Helen, who won her first Tony Award for her role as the Queen in The Audience last month, said you “don’t lose interest as a woman”, or even as a man, in these things as you get older.

“All we do is we get more knowledge about them. We get more knowledge about what’s good for you, what’s bad for you, what works for you, what doesn’t work for you. And so I don’t see why, as an older person, you should be excluded from the fun of all of that, you know?”

The stage and screen actress said she does not have a motto for life but said she is getting less and less rule-bound.

“There are ways of living life… and we impose rules upon ourselves all the time,” she said.

Referring to her appearance in a beauty campaign, she joked: “To do a beauty campaign at my age is a bit sort of out of order really.”