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The BBC has become embroiled in further controversy after a veteran DJ was reportedly forced to resign for accidentally playing a song containing a racist slur, it has emerged, only days after bosses refused to sack Jeremy Clarkson for appearing to use the same term during filming .
David Lowe, a broadcaster for BBC Radio Devon, played a 1932 version of 'The Sun Has Got His Hat On', which unbeknown to him, contained the line "he's been tanning n****rs out in Timbuktu", on his Sunday evening show last month, prompting a complaint from a listener, which led managers to ask him to resign, according to The Telegraph .
Mr Lowe, 67, initially offered to apologise for what he claims was a genuine mistake on air or "fall on his sword". He then reportedly received an email from bosses, which said that they would rather him not mention anything about the broadcast, before another email said: "Regrettably... we will have to accept your offer to fall on your sword."
The BBC released a statement to The Telegraph, which said: "We have offered David Lowe the opportunity to continue presenting his ‘Singers and Swingers’ show, and we would be happy to have him back on air. We accept that the conversation with David about the mistake could have been handled better, but if he chooses not to continue then we would like to thank him for his time presenting on the station and wish him well for the future.”
The presenter, however, has said the row has left him so stressed that he no longer feels he can carry on working.
Show all 26 1 /26Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "Short people. When you've finished using a car, put the f**king seat back, so humans can use it afterwards," he posted on Twitter. Offensively.
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "Honestly, the burka doesn’t work. I was in a cab in Piccadilly the other day when a woman in a full burka crossing the road in front of me tripped over the pavement, went head over heels and up it came, red G-string and stockings."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines Driving a Jaguar round a toilet in India: "This is perfect for India because everyone who comes here gets the trots."
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Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "The only person who looked good in a 4-seated convertible was Adolf Hitler."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines As a Thai man walked over a bridge he had built during a Top Gear challenge: "That is a proud moment - but there’s a slope on it."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the Ferrari F430 Speciale: "it was a bit wrong ... that smiling front end ... it looked like a simpleton ... [it] should have been called the 430 Speciale needs."
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Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the Renault Clio V6 handling bends: "In typical French fashion it just gives up! A bit like the French did with the Germans."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "I'm thinking. If you had gone to the trouble of making a chemical bomb, why would you detonate it on a coach from Preston?"
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On public sector workers in 2011: “I’d have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.”
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "I don't understand bus lanes. Why do poor people have to get to places quicker than I do?"
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "The only reason the Arabs and Jews have managed to keep their nasty little war going for 50 years is because it never bloody rains there. If the post-war powers had put Israel in Manchester, there'd have been no bloodshed."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "If all the creatures on earth were the same size, it's said a lobster would have the smallest brain. But then someone invented Wayne Rooney."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the invention of the segway: "They're made in America, of course, so fat Yanks can go to the fridge without expending any energy."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "Supercars are supposed to run over Arthur Scargill and then run over him again for good measure. They are designed to melt ice caps, kill the poor, poison the water table, destroy the ozone layer, decimate indigenous wildlife, recapture the Falkland Islands and turn the entire third world into a huge uninhabitable desert, all that before they nicked all the oil in the world."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "I’m sorry, but having an Aston Martin DB9 on the drive and not driving it is a bit like having Keira Knightley in your bed and sleeping on the couch. If you’ve got even half a scrotum it’s not going to happen."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On a caravaning holiday: “You aren’t allowed to have a party, you aren’t allowed to have music, you aren’t allowed to play ball games, you aren’t allowed to have a camp fire, you have to park within two feet of a post, you have to keep quiet, you have to be in bed by eleven. This is not a holiday, it’s a concentration camp!”
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "Britain’s nuclear submarines have been deemed unsafe… probably because they don’t have wheel-chair access."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines “If we are being honest HIV is a pathetic virus, it can only live in the air for 6 seconds and it does what ebola does to you in 10 days in 10 years.”
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the Lotus Elise: “This car is more fun than the entire french air force crashing into a firework factory.”
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On actress Sarah Jessica Parker: “People think ‘oh she must be pretty’. She isn’t – she looks like a boiled horse."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On Liverpool: "People up there earn less, die more quickly, have fewer jobs and live in houses that are worth the square root of sod all."
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Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the BMW Z3: "And if you are clinically insane, by which I mean you wake up in the morning and think you are an onion, here’s your car."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the Ferrari 430 Scuderia: “It’s like God having really unusual sex… it should come with toilet roll.”
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "If you're thinking of coming to America, this is what it's like: you've got your Comfort Inn, you've got your Best Western, and you've got your Red Lobster where you eat. Everybody's very fat, everybody's very stupid and everybody's very rude - it's not a holiday programme, it's the truth."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the N-word row: "I’ve been told by the BBC that if I make one more offensive remark, anywhere, at any time, I will be sacked."
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He told The Sunday Telegraph : “Unfortunately my health has to come first. The way the BBC have handled this is terrible and it has aggravated my condition. It was an honest mistake, but I’m afraid I won’t be going back on air.”
The revelations come 10 days after Jeremy Clarkson was forced to deny using the N-word during filming for an episode of Top Gear. In one take, it appeared that the presenter used the phrase "eeny meeny, miny, moe, catch a n***r by his toe" when reciting the nursery rhyme, leading to calls for him to be sacked.
Clarkson is said to be on his final warning from the BBC , and Ofcom announced this week that they were launching an investigation into his use of the word "slope" (which has previously been used as a derogatory term for people of Asian descent) during an episode filmed in Burma .
