...but leave our Olympic heroine alone

BBC watchdogs have rapped Mock the Week for broadcasting Frankie Boyle’s jokes about Olympic gold medallist Rebecca Adlington – but said they were right to air his gag about the Queen’s ‘pussy being haunted’.

The BBC Trust today ruled that the gags about Adlington, broadcast soon after the swimmer’s success last August, were ‘offensive and unacceptable for broadcast’.

They added: ‘There had been no clear editorial justification for including these comments in the broadcast. The programme had breached the BBC’s editorial guidelines on harm and offence.’

The complaint was triggered by Boyle saying: ‘The thing that nobody really said about Rebecca Adlington is that she looks pretty weird. She looks like someone who’s looking at themselves in the back of a spoon.

‘And then, when she arrived back on the flight she met her boyfriend. Did you see her boyfriend? He was really attractive. He was like a male model. So from that I have deduced that Rebecca Adlington is very dirty – I mean if you just take into account how long she can hold her breath…’

A total of 75 viewers complained – a record for the show –but the BBC initially defended the jokes, with its editorial complaints unit saying they did not amount to a ‘serious breach’ of guidelines

The producer of the show said: ‘I was aware that Frankie Boyle’s typically misanthropic comments were not in accord with a jubilant nation but reasoned that they were not outrageously offensive and were wholly consistent with Frankie’s hugely popular comedy persona in the show as both a perpetually negative voice and someone whose “seedy lifestyle” is reflected in his inability to view celebrities by any yardstick other than their physical attractiveness. In the show, the host Dara O’Briain immediately chided Frankie on the inappropriateness of his position.’

However, one viewer who said he was ‘appalled’ by the gags, persisted with his complaint and took it all the way to the Trust, who upheld his complaint.

The governing body, however, rejected a complaint about a repeat broadcast last October when Boyle, asked to think of something the Queen would not say in her Christmas speech, said: ‘I have had a few medical issues this year - I'm now so old that my pussy is haunted.’

The joke was picked up by the Daily Mail as further evidence of the BBC’s unacceptable behaviour in the wake of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s phone calls to Andrew Sachs.

In a news story, the paper stated: ‘Boyle's “gag” is just one example of the depths to which the BBC has fallen’. The joke had been aired three times previously without attracting any tabloid interest

One viewer complained to the BBC Trust: ‘In my view this is a thing you shouldn’t hear anyone say on public funded BBC television, involving as it does the nastiest kind of lese-majesty and ageism. It would have been objectionable at the best of times but coming as it did in the midst of the Ross and Brand controversy it was quite unforgivable.’

However, trustees ruled that it ‘although the remark was in poor taste and clearly was offensive to some of the audience, it would not have exceeded the audience’s expectations of the programme’.

Here is that gag:

Published: 19 Oct 2009