"You cheap lousy faggot"

So after all the fuss about Radio 1 first censoring Fairytale of New York, and then deciding not to when the entire world and Radio 2 went "Eh? WTF?" they end up dubbing it after all on the Christmas TOTP2.

Now apart from the insanity of screwing with the most famous line of the most popular Christmas song ever (TM) I'll concede it was actually done in an impressively seamless way, substituting "you're drunk and you're haggard" for "you cheap lousy faggot". So if you didn't know what it was supposed to be, you wouldn't, in fact, notice. The point being, everybody does know what it's supposed to be. And everyone, with the exception of Peter "shut up I'm chewing a wasp" Tatchell, who takes offence at everything on principle and should therefore sensibly be ignored, thinks it's bonkers to change it.

Bizarrely, they left in the other line that was earmarked for dubbing, "you're an old slut on junk." Which, for the last twenty years, I have heard as "you're an old southern drunk." So the only outcome of the whole debacle is to make the song marginally more offensive than it had been in my head. A stonking result for the BBC there, then.

--