The Boat Race, BBC One, 31 March 2013

Complaint

We received complaints from viewers who were offended by bad language in our live coverage of The Boat Race.

The BBC's response

We are very sorry that our live coverage of The Boat Race included two instances of audible swearing from one of the coxes, as we recognise that this offended some viewers. On both occasions, in accordance with the BBC Editorial Guidelines covering live output, our commentators immediately apologised on-air, and we subsequently removed the offending language before making the programme available on BBC iPlayer. BBC Sport take such matters very seriously and, as in previous years, the production team had spoken with both coxes beforehand to emphasise that they should not swear because their voices would be picked up by on-board microphones. We would like to reassure our audiences that we will be looking at ways to ensure we can avoid a repetition of these unfortunate incidents in future years.