BBC PRESENTER DANNY Baker has been fired from his radio programme over a picture he tweeted in response to the birth of the royal baby.
Baker tweeted an image of a couple walking down a set of steps holding the hands of a chimpanzee, and captioned it “Royal baby leaves hospital”.
The tweet was later deleted and the 61-year-old took to Twitter to say it was a “stupid unthinking gag”.
“Once again. Sincere apologies for the stupid unthinking gag pic earlier. Was supposed to be joke about Royals vs circus animals in posh clothes but interpreted as about monkeys & race, so rightly deleted. Royal watching not my forte,” he said.
This morning he tweeted: “Just got fired from @bbc5live”.
Speaking to Sky News later, Baker said: “I’ve seen these things happen to other people, you never think it’s going to happen to you.
“The unconscious and ridiculous tweet I did yesterday spurred all this off,” Baker said.
“I made a joke about Archie and then I thought, oh, my go to photograph when posh people walk out or have kids – I went to that stupid photograph of a chimp in top-hat and I shouldn’t have done.
“Nobody invites this onto themselves… I had no idea,” he said when asked if he thought about how the photo might have been perceived by the public.
Baker also said he “genuinely didn’t” know which member of the royal family was having a child.
The Londoner first entered the spotlight as host of the Six O’Clock show on London Weekend Television in the 1980s and went on to host a Saturday night TV chat show on the BBC.
He joined BBC Radio 5 Live in 1990 and went on to host other shows on Radio 1, before returning to the station in 2009.
The radio presenter hosted The Danny Baker Show on BBC Radio 5 Live and has just embarked on a stand-up tour of the UK.
A spokesperson told BBC News: “This was a serious error of judgment and goes against the values we as a station aim to embody. Danny’s a brilliant broadcaster but will no longer be presenting a weekly show with us.”
Comedian Dara O’Briain said he was “genuinely amazed” at the decision to sack Baker.
“What? Danny Baker got fired? But he immediately apologised and deleted the tweet! I mean, literally, in the event of mistakenly causing offence, what else can you do? Genuinely amazed by that,” he said.
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