The most famous film featuring a red double-decker is 1962's Summer Holiday. Garage mechanic Don (Cliff Richard) persuades London Transport to lend him the vehicle, which he and his mates transform into a hotel on wheels. But as bus fans will know, the number nine that Cliff and co take on a road trip around Europe was actually an AEC Regent III RT, not a Routemaster. 

A lot of the buses that turn up on our screens are in fact the RT model an earlier, heavier version of the hop-on, hop-off double-decker bus, first created in 1939. It's also cropped up on:

• Live And Let Die, the James Bond film from 1973, includes a chase sequence on a Caribbean island involving a RT bus.
  
  
• Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban (2004). The purple, triple-decker Knight Bus is also an RT model. It can go anywhere except underwater and is used to transport stranded witches and wizards by driver Ernie Prang and conductor Stan Shunpike.
  
  

Despite its older cousin muscling in, this seems to have done nothing to stop the Routemaster remaining the star of the show.

• The last episode of the cult 1984 TV comedy series The Young Ones, paid tribute to Summer Holiday. The hapless students become bored during the summer holidays and decide to rob a bank. They make their escape in a Routemaster but then drive off the edge of a cliff. The bus explodes into flames.
  
  
• In the 2002 sci-fi thriller film 28 Days Later, London becomes affected by a mysterious virus which leads to deserted streets. One very eerie shot shows a Routemaster bus lying on its side at the gates of 10 Downing Street with not a person in sight. The horizontal vehicle is a symbol of the suffering capital.
  
  
• Blur, a band associated with London, have used the AEC Routemaster in two of their videos. In the 1992 single For Tomorrow, singer Damon Albarn hangs off the platform of a London Transport Routemaster while going around Trafalgar Square. Their video for Parklife also features a Routemaster displaying route 700-Parklife.
  
  
• Not to be outdone by their southern rivals, the Oasis video Go Let it Out (2000) includes a silver painted former London Transport RT model of bus.
  
  
• During Terry Venables' England Crazy video (2002), the former England football manager-cum-crooner tours around London on an open-top Routemaster, complete with swing band.
  
  
• A Routemaster often appears in the popular BBC soap EastEnders, symbolising escape from Albert Square. It's very handy that passengers can hop on in a hurry, because characters from the soap are normally boarding the bus with their enemy in hot pursuit. Either that or they are going "Up West".
  
  
• The classic 1970s TV comedy series about drivers and conductors, On The Buses, mainly featured Eastern National Bristol Lodekkas, not Routemasters. There was one episode in 1972 where a RTL 1557 made an appearance. Stan (played by Reg Varney) took it out, because there was no other bus available, but a fire broke out on board and it was destroyed.
  
  

The Routemaster was also used to raise the profile of a charity protest.

Dr Joanna Brown, from the University of Leeds, was responsible for one of these buses travelling from Glastonbury Festival up to the G8 in Edinburgh in 2005. It had thousands of campaigners' signatures over it, urging political leaders to "Make Poverty History".

She chose the Routemaster because it symbolises community –  the coming together of people from different backgrounds to go on a journey. The bus also reminded her of warmth, brightness, joy and peacefulness.