The TV executive behind Adele’s famous trip to Jamba Juice on Ellen DeGeneres’s US talk show has said he dreaded a publicist interfering and stopping it from happening.

The clip of the Hello singer chewing on wheatgrass and doing an impression of a deer in the Los Angeles juice outlet has been viewed more than eight million times on Ellentube and many more on YouTube. During the filming Ellen was secretly instructing Adele on how to act through a hidden ear piece.

David McGuire, executive vice president of current programming at the show’s production company Telepictures Productions, told the Edinburgh International Television Festival: “Adele was touring the States, she was one of the biggest stars on the planet and is also hilarious.

“She is willing to have fun with us because she has seen clips of other people having fun.

“So we book Adele to go on the talk show and you hope some publicist doesn’t get in the way of us having fun with Adele, quite frankly,

“She shows up and she loves Ellen and she loves the show and she says ‘I’m game, tell me what to do’.”

He continued: “There is a Jamba Juice on the Warner Bros lot, we rig up the cameras without the staff seeing and send her down there.

Finding Dory UK premiere – London
Ellen DeGeneres attends the UK premiere of Finding Dory (PA)

“You never know what you’re going to get in this moment, sometimes these things work and sometimes they don’t.

“When she started eating the grass and talking about Swishy Chug, which we had just made up, you could feel it was going to go viral.

“What we didn’t do was contact Jamba Juice six months ago and say ‘here is the set up’.”

The Ellen DeGeneres Show airs on ITV2 in the UK.