Will the King of Hanover give an address?
His Majesty the King is expected to offer Christmas remarks, yes.
RADIO DJ SACKED FOR INTERRUPTING QUEEN'S SPEECH.
Presenter Tom Binns stops speech, saying: 'Two words: Bor-ing', and plays Wham! song.
John Plunkett guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 29 December 2009 16.01 GMT Article history
A radio DJ has been sacked after interrupting the Queen's speech on-air, telling listeners: "Two words: Bor-ing."
Stand-up comic and radio presenter Tom Binns made the comments during a Christmas Day show on Birmingham radio station BRMB.
The station took a feed of the Queen's annual address by mistake and Binns – who was working alone in the studio – took the decision to take it off air.
Binns then made a joke about the French royal family being beheaded and introduced the next song, Last Christmas by Wham!, with the words "from one Queen to another..."
The station's parent company Orion Media said a "small number" of listeners complained and confirmed that Binns would not be working for them again.
The Queen used her Christmas message to the nation to express her sadness at the loss of UK troops in Afghanistan in the bloodiest year for British forces since the invasion in 2001.
Binns, whose comic characters include inept hospital radio DJ Ivan Brackenbury, said he had not been listening to the content of the speech, but decided to interrupt because the station should have been broadcasting a news bulletin instead.
"I knew it shouldn't be there, but having never heard it before, I didn't know how long it was going to go on for," said Binns.
"I'm not trained to make editorial decisions, but I decided to get rid of it and make a joke. I said: 'Two words: bor-ing.'
"I then went into an old riff about how people say the royal family are good for tourism, but the French beheaded theirs and people still visit France. The next record was George Michael's Last Christmas, so I made some sort of comment about 'going from one Queen to another' as a parody of a cheesy DJ."
"Nobody would have tuned in to hear the Queen's speech and I tried to deal with in in a funny way. After all they employ comedians to make jokes," Binns told comedy website Chortle.
Binns said the decision to fire him was a "knee-jerk reaction" and said broadcasters had been "scared to death" of regulators since the "Sachsgate" affair on BBC Radio 2 when Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand left lewd messages on actor Andrew Sachs's answer machine.
"It's got to the point where comedians aren't allowed to say anything that could possibly offend anyone anymore," he added.
Binns said one listener sent him a message saying he should be sent to Iraq and hoped that he would be killed by a roadside bomb. "Other than that almost all the texts we received were in support of what I'd done."
Binns's show was syndicated on BRMB's sister stations including Mercia, Wyvern and Beacon, also in the West midlands.
The Orion Media Group programme and marketing director, David Lloyd, said: "On Christmas Day, one of our presenters Tom Binns made some inappropriate comments surrounding the Queen's speech.
"We do not condone what he said in any way, whether said in jest or not. We are making contact with the small number of listeners who were offended by Tom's comments and have complained to us to convey our apologies and have also apologised on air.
"Tom will now not be featuring again on our radio stations."
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One word: Dunce.
Likely, to Tom Binn, Her Majesty's remarks were boring. You don't listen to the Queen for excitement. You listen for vision, direction, context and so on. These things might not be exciting, but they are still of interest to a great many people.
Insulting the Queen directly like that in her own realm is the same as flipping the finger to every one of her subjects. Seems good to me that the radio company, a for profit enterprise, would not want to be associated with that type of poor judgment.
What makes me dislike the man even more is that, after complaining that the Queen was 'boring', he replaced her with Wham!
Now, if it were, say, the Stones or Clapton...but Wham?
Surely 'boring' beats 'stupid'.