Comedic values

I see the BBC is once again in a self-flagellation mode again with the news that Mock the Week has been censured for a joke by Frankie Boyle about Rebecca Adlington.

The joke "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" was deemed "humiliating" by the BBC Trust.

Now look, there were 75 complaints, yep 75! That's from an audience of around 2m. And that wasn't the end of it - One, that's ONE, viewer continued to complain which resulted in the formal censure.

So 0.0037% of viewers complained intially. Then 0.00005% of viewers were sad enough to keep going.

Listen, I like Mock The Week. I find Frankie Boyle is gloriously rude and bare knuckled. Some of his jokes are extremely close to the bone but that's him. If you don't like it, turn of the TV, watch something else, do something else. Don't try and decide for me and 1,999,998 other viewers (or 1,999,924 other viewers if you include the original sad cu..complainees) what we can watch post-watershed.

Interestingly The Trust concluded that a joke about the Queen was "in bad taste" but was broadcast long after the watershed and was "within audience expectations for the show".

So were the Adlington jokes.