Royals: Camilla visits the BBC’s Tiny Happy People project

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Camilla, who turns 75 on July 17, devours crime fiction, particularly the Roy Grace detective novels set in Brighton by Peter James, so it should perhaps come as no surprise that she pleads guilty to loving the real thing.

She met the presenters of Crimewatch Live yesterday during a visit to BBC Wales in Cardiff and told them: “Very nice to meet you. I love Crimewatch. I was always amazed by how many crimes were actually solved.”

The Duchess chatted to presenters Rav Wilding and Michelle Ackerley and senior members of the production team who told her that one in five crime reconstructions featured on the programme leads to an arrest and then one in three of those leads to a conviction. “Amazing,” she said.

At the studios she met a familiar face: domestic violence campaigner Rachel Williams, who was shot at close range by her violent, estranged husband in 2011 when he broke into the hairdressers where she worked before killing himself. Shortly afterwards their 16-year-old son, Jack, took his own life.

Ms Williams has met the Duchess several times and her story was one of those which inspired Camilla to launch a campaign highlighting violence against women.

She gave the Duchess a drawing of herself and Prince Charles created by another survivor whose perpetrator refused to let her draw until she had finished her long list of “chores” each day.

Camilla was also given two knitted coats for her Jack Russell dogs, Beth and Bluebell. Ms Williams told her: “Please keep doing what you are doing, you are such an advocate.”

The Duchess praised Rachel for telling her story. “It’s so important for survivors such as yourself to speak out because it makes people aware of it,” she said. “On Crimewatch you can draw attention to these things.”

She asked the presenters when they were back on air. “October we are back on air for the next run of 15 shows. And now we’ll know you will be watching now,” Wilding joked.

“You must let me know,” Camilla said. “What I want to know is how on Earth you pick the crimes?”

Wilding explained: ‘“Well we are lucky in that we have lots of officers coming to us with their various cases that they want help with. We try and spread it out and work with every police force, all 43 of them, across the UK, and give everyone an opportunity to air what they need help with.”

Ackerley added: “It’s also trying to be reactive as well and topical. At the minute we are coming off the back of the pandemic and we have seen a lot of fraud associated with Covid scams and vaccination scams. So we try and raise awareness around that and show things that are affecting people in a real time.”

Camilla and her husband Prince Charles were visiting BBC Wales’s headquarters in Cardiff to launch the broadcaster’s new public tours of the building.

Charles, 73, went to the main studio and contributed to an audio recording of Under Milk Wood in the Dylan Thomas Radio Studio.

His wife, meanwhile, joined a discussion about women working in media, telling the group cheerfully: “You can’t keep a good woman down.”

In the £120 million building’s atrium, opened in 2020, the heir to the throne snapped a clapperboard to launch the new programme of public tours.

The royal couple, who also went to see Cardiff’s statue of Betty Campbell, Wales’s first black headteacher, were in the city at the start of three days of engagements in Wales.

Later thousands of people turned out to see them in the former mining town of Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley, where the Prince pulled a pint in The Lion pub and sampled Glamorgan-brewed Thunderbird beer at 2Dudes, a craft beer shop on the high street.

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