Katie Price said Frankie Boyle’s joke about her disabled son Harvey was “vile” Media regulator Ofcom has censured comedian Frankie Boyle and Channel 4 for broadcasting “offensive” jokes about Katie Price and her son Harvey.
Ofcom upheld 500 complaints about Boyle’s routine, broadcast in December.
It appeared to “target and mock the mental and physical disabilities” of the eight year-old, Ofcom said.
Channel 4 said it was “wholly justified in the context”. Chief executive David Abraham personally sanctioned the jokes before they were broadcast.
Katie Price was among those who complained about the comments in Boyle’s comedy series Tramadol Nights, saying they were discriminatory, offensive, demeaning and humiliating.
In response, Channel 4 said: “Nothing he says is intended as a slur on any particular community – everyone is fair game in Frankie’s eyes.”
One remark about Harvey was not “a joke about Harvey Price’s disability, or about rape or incest – it is simply absurdist satire”, Channel 4 said.
“We do not believe that any viewer would have taken this particular joke literally,” it added.
The broadcaster also said Boyle’s remarks were meant to satirise Price’s alleged “exploitation of her children for publicity purposes… her behaviour as a mother and her cavalier attitude towards relationships”.
The show was preceded by adequate warnings for the audience, the broadcaster argued, and said it had a job to “champion pioneering and distinctive voices in British comedy and bring them to a wider audience”.
But the regulator ruled that allowing the jokes to be screened was “an erroneous decision on a matter of editorial judgement on the broadcaster’s part”.
Ofcom accepted that Price and ex-husbands Alex Reid and Peter Andre had “consciously exposed their and their children’s lives to the media” and must expect to be the targets of humour and criticism.
Top Gear was cleared after complaints over jokes about Mexican people But it continued: “The fact that a public figure chooses to expose some aspects of his or her child’s life in the media does not provide broadcasters with unlimited licence to broadcast comedy that targets humour at such a child’s expense.
“This position applies even more firmly in a case in which the child is as young as eight years old, and has a number of disabilities which are specifically focussed on as the target of that intended humour.”
The ruling also said: “Ofcom was of the view that the material in question appeared to directly target and mock the mental and physical disabilities of a known eight year-old child who had not himself chosen to be in the public eye.
“As such, Ofcom found that the comments had considerable potential to be highly offensive to the audience.”
Ofcom said the second episode of Boyle’s comedy series, aired on 7 December, broke two rules in its broadcasting code.
At a recent media conference in Salford, Mr Abraham said he cleared the jokes personally, explaining: “It is all about context, but if Channel 4 isn’t going to test these boundaries then who else will?”
A Channel 4 spokesperson pointed out that Ofcom did not impose sanctions, such as a fine or an on-air apology, and did not consider it to be a fundamental failure in compliance procedures.
Ofcom cleared a further episode of Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights, in which he made a joke about people with mental health problems.
The spokesperson said: “Channel 4 acknowledges Ofcom’s findings in relation to Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights and his comments about Katie Price. We welcome their finding that we were not in breach of the code regarding any other sketches or jokes within the series.”
Meanwhile, Ofcom also cleared BBC Two’s Top Gear after the hosts made fun of Mexican people for being “lazy”.
The regulator said the comments were “based on negative national stereotypes and had the potential to be very offensive both to Mexican people specifically, as well as to viewers more generally”.
But it said viewers would have been familiar with the show’s “mocking, playground-style humour”, adding that “to restrict humour only to material which does not cause offence would be an unnecessary restriction of freedom of expression”.
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