The BBC’s Chief Content Officer Kate Phillips has apologised to all staff after a racial slur involuntarily shouted by a Tourette’s campaigner was not censored from the BBC’s BAFTA Awards broadcast. Phillips said this afternoon:
“I’m so sorry that a racial slur was not edited out of our broadcast. We understand how distressing this was. Award attendees were pre-warned about the possibility of involuntary verbal tics associated with Tourette Syndrome at the start of the show, and Alan Cumming addressed it during the broadcast. Of course, this doesn’t lessen the impact and upset. We would never have knowingly allowed this to be broadcast. We take full responsibility for what happened… Again, I am so very sorry for the distress caused.”
She adds that a second slur was caught in the edit, but one nonetheless aired in error. BBC News “understands” that the BBC producers responsible for managing the output simply didn’t hear it. Days since the BBC had to report on itself: zero…
Green Deputy Leader Rachel Millward said:
“The reality is that it’s Zack Polanski who brought the nation, Andy Burnham. And if we hadn’t had the success of the Green Party in this last year since Zack’s been leading, which has been unprecedented, phenomenal success and a growth from about 60,000 members to 230,000, if we hadn’t had that much pressure on Labour, then we’d probably still be in the Starmer regime, which was pretty much ushering in a Reform government with its lurch to the right. So actually, what we’re seeing now is that we’ve set the political agenda and the government is picking that up.”