Russell Howard: BBC censored Olympic stand-up

Celebrity

Published on September 26th, 2012 | by Anthony Lund

The comedian has claimed that the BBC would not allow anyone to poke fun at the sporting event after so much money was spent on it.

Comedian Russell Howard has accused the BBC of censoring comedians’ routines about the Olympic Games, as “too much money had been spent on them for stand-up acts to poke fun at events”.

Howard told Digital Spy, “There’s too much money in it. The powers that be didn’t want people making jokes about the Olympics, it’s too important apparently.

‘We’d have made jokes about the Olympics in the same way as we always do. It would have been a light touch and we’d have only touched on things that were genuinely funny like Boris on the zip wire, the Queen during the Opening Ceremony with the most bored face ever.

‘But nobody ever commented on these things because of a weird censorship.’

Many programmes were cleared from the BBC schedules to make way for the Olympics over the summer, with Mock the Week being put on hiatus and BBC removing programmes such as Howard’s Good News in favour of sports related programmes.

While TV may have been impacted, radio comedy surrounding the event seemed to go unaffected.

Should the BBC be able to dictate what is and isn’t made fun of?