David Walliams: outrage over One Direction gag

AS OFCOM decides whether Channel 4 broke decency rules when it aired a lewd joke by comic David Walliams, veteran broadcaster Libby Purves has entered the debate with a plea for old-fashioned innuendo.

Appearing on Chris Moyles' Quiz Night - which goes out at 10pm, half an hour after the official watershed – Walliams was shown a video of boy band One Direction. He and Moyles pretended to simper over the band in the way teenage fans might.

After saying how much he liked 17-year-old band member Harry Styles's hair, Walliams dropped the girly front to declare baldly: "I'd like to suck his cock." Cue audience laughter – and slightly embarrassed guffaws from Hollywood star Will Ferrell, who was also appearing on the show.

The joke prompted four complaints from the public, double the number the BBC initially got when Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand made their infamous phone call to Andrew Sachs, prompting a furore which ended Ross's reign as chat show king. (Once Ross's gaffe appeared in the newspapers, thousands more complaints were made.)

Ofcom is now investigating the Walliams incident, with a spokesman stating: "We will assess the complaints against the Broadcasting Code, the rule book of standards which broadcasters must adhere to."

Channel 4 defended its decision to clear the gag for transmission, saying: "The show was appropriately scheduled post-watershed at 10pm and viewers were warned of strong language and adult humour."

It seems unlikely that Radio 4 stalwart Libby Purves was tuned in to Moyles's show – but writing in The Sunday Telegraph, she says she finds Walliams's "infantile genital fixation" yet another example of a new "tedious, universal, uninventive coarsness".

Comedy on TV has become "aggressive, contemptuous and cruel", writes Purves. This will "damage us" because it leads adults to believe that sex is "something to be flaunted and traded and pornified and objectified".

But, perhaps worst of all, modern explicitness has destroyed traditional innuendo: "When we ditched public modesty, we lost the joys of suggestiveness. I sort of miss that, too."

Read Libby Purves in full at The Sunday Telegraph. ·