Stephen Fry joke on QI about choirboy 'at the margins of acceptability'

 
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The BBC Trust has rejected a complaint that Stephen Fry "trivialised" child abuse after he recited a limerick about a choirboy with a "bottom like jelly on springs" on QI before an edition of Newsnight covering the Jimmy Savile sex scandal.

A report by the BBC Trust's Editorial Standards Committee said the broadcast was "at the margins of acceptability" but was not in breach of the editorial guidelines.

The show aired on January 11 featured a section in which Fry recited the lines: "There was a young chaplain from King's, Who talked about God and such things, But his real desire, Was a boy in the choir, With a bottom like jelly on springs."

The ESC report said the complaint was made by a woman who "felt that the BBC showed a lack of understanding of what the limerick implied. The complainant said that the limerick trivialised the subject of paedophilia."

The airing of the show, which was filmed months before broadcast, was untimely as it was then followed by Newsnight which featured the Savile scandal as its leading story.

In its evidence to the committee, BBC TV said: "The likelihood of causing offence was, we acknowledge, increased by the news agenda on the day of broadcast. However, the comparisons that can be drawn between the scenario described in the limerick and the nature and extent of the abuse perpetrated by Jimmy Savile are, in our view, limited."

It also pointed out there was a gap of almost three minutes between Fry's performance and the start of the current affairs show and that " the object of the humour was the hypocrisy of a chaplain, and not the act of paedophilia".

The committee said the decision to broadcast the verse was "finely balanced" but "most viewers would not consider the limerick's content strong enough to find a resonance in the Newsnight report".

The complaint was not upheld.

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