‘Have I Got News For You’ Producer Torches BBC Investigation Into Victoria Beckham Joke As “Total Waste” Of Money

EXCLUSIVE: Have I Got News for You producer Jimmy Mulville is unhappy with the BBC‘s decision to censure the show over a joke involving Victoria Beckham.

In a statement shared with Deadline, Mulville — a producer who rarely pulls his punches — said the nearly year-long investigation into the joke after two viewer complaints was a “total waste of the licence fee” and an example of the “BBC’s paranoia about causing offence.”

In a ruling published on Thursday, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit concluded that host Katherine Ryan‘s gag, in which Beckham was compared to a “c**t,” was editorially unjustified. The unit ordered that the joke be removed from the show. It followed two viewers complaining that it was “gratuitously offensive.”

Mulville, the founder of Hat Trick, said the Executive Complaints Unit missed the meaning of Ryan’s joke. He explained: “Katherine and Victoria exchanged messages on Instagram about the remark, which Katherine put into its intended context.

“In contemporary queer and ballroom culture, the word has been reclaimed. It is used to describe someone who looks extremely confident, impeccably styled, fierce, or authentically and powerfully feminine. Katherine Ryan is a woman who would not disparage another woman in that way.”

Mulville continued: “The fact the two members of a 6 million audience took offence, which then triggered a year-long investigation by the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit, whom we’ve never met and sounds like something out of Kafka, is a total waste of the licence fee and is another example of the BBC’s paranoia about causing offence. HIGNFY is set up to be comically and intentionally offensive.”

Mulville joked: “My own definition of a c**t is someone who spends all day looking for problems that don’t exist.”

The BBC has been approached for comment.

In its ruling, the BBC’s complaints unit said: “There was no justification for a comment which presented Victoria Beckham as equivalent to a particularly offensive word.” The ruling added: “The relevant BBC editorial guidelines do not require programmes to avoid giving offence but do require that any offence should be editorially justified.”

The Executive Complaints Unit said its ruling was reported to senior leaders in BBC content. The original Have I Got News for You episode was edited and re-uploaded to iPlayer. The joke no longer appears in the version available on the streaming service.