LONDON-Danny Baker, a British broadcaster and comedy writer who hosted a weekend radio show on the BBC’s 5 Live channel, was fired by the network for a racist tweet depicting Archie, the newborn son of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, as a monkey.
The tweet, which has since been deleted, showed a couple holding hands with a chimpanzee wearing clothes, captioned with the text, “Royal Baby leaves hospital,” per the BBC and the Independent. Given the fact that Meghan is biracial, the post was swiftly criticized on social media.
“This was a serious error of judgment and goes against the values we as a station aim to embody,” the BBC said in a statement on their site and to the Independent. “Danny’s a brilliant broadcaster but will no longer be presenting a weekly show with us.”
Baker, 61, initially apologized for his tweet, before changing course and criticizing the BBC for his firing.
At first, he wrote, “Sorry my gag pic of the little fella in the posh outfit has whipped some up. Never occurred to me because, well, mind not diseased. Soon as those good enough to point out it’s possible connotations got in touch, down it came. And that’s it.”
Baker later explained that his original tweet “was supposed to be (a) joke about Royals vs circus animals in posh clothes but interpreted as about monkeys & race, so rightly deleted. Royal watching (is) not my forte. Also, guessing it was my turn in the barrel.”
He added that he “would have used same stupid pic for any other Royal birth or Boris Johnson kid or even one of my own. It’s a funny image. (Though not of course in that context.)”
Baker also extended an apology to the royal baby, writing that his tweet had been an “enormous mistake, for sure. Grotesque. Anyway, here’s to ya Archie. Sorry mate.”
After his firing, Baker adopted a more adversarial tone on Twitter, posting a profane message about his former employer. “The call to fire me from @bbc5live was a masterclass of pompous faux-gravity,” he wrote. “Took a tone that said I actually meant that ridiculous tweet and the BBC must uphold blah blah blah. Literally threw me under the bus. Could hear the suits knees knocking.”
The longtime radio host has had a history of controversy He was previously fired from the BBC in 1997 for encouraging football fans to harass a referee over the outcome of a game. In 2012, he resigned after lashing out against his bosses when the network moved his show to the weekend. Both times, he eventually returned to the network.
In 2016, Harry confirmed his relationship with Meghan in order to condemn what he felt was racist and sexist coverage of the woman who would later become his wife.
“His girlfriend, Meghan Markle, has been subject to a wave of abuse and harassment,” a palace statement said at the time. “Some of this has been very public – the smear on the front page of a national newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments.”