BBC Boss Answers Key Questions on BAFTA Tourette’s Broadcast and Details Edit Team Mix-Up: “A Genuine Error”

Outgoing BBC director-general Tim Davie has answered key questions at the center of the BAFTA-Tourette’s controversy, including why the racial slur shouted by campaigner John Davidson as Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented was not cut from the final broadcast.

The 2026 BAFTA Film Awards, at which Davidson was representing his nominated film I Swear, chronicling his experience growing up with Tourette’s in Scotland, aired on a two-hour delay on the BBC and remained on streaming service iPlayer until the following morning.

The backlash has now entered its second week, with Davidson claiming he was “deeply mortified” if anyone thought his tics were “intentional,” and BAFTA putting out a detailed apology to all involved. The incident was a topic of discussion at the recent NAACP Image Awards, as well as a recent SNL sketch that had The Hollywood Reporter asking: Is there a U.S.-U.K. gap on Tourette’s education?

On Friday, Davie said in a letter to the chair of the U.K. government’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee that the broadcaster’s initial evidence has found that the incident was “a genuine error.” He said: “No one in the on-site broadcast truck heard [the N-word] when they were watching the live feed.”

He continued: “Because no one in the broadcast truck was aware it was on the live feed,” adding: “There was therefore no editorial decision made to leave the language in.”

Davie then explained that when a second racial slur was shouted as Sinners‘ Wunmi Mosaku was accepting her best supporting actress award, the Tourette’s outburst was caught by the edit team and removed “immediately from the version of the ceremony that would be broadcast later that evening,” Davie said.

This meant that when reports started to stream in on the racial slur, he said the editing team in the truck “mistakenly believed they had edited out the incident that was being referenced, on the basis that they had heard and edited out the slur shouted out during the best supporting actress award. Therefore, when they were told a racial slur had been shouted, they believed they had removed it.”

The BBC chief was unable to answer why the iPlayer stream stayed up for over 15 hours. He said: “We are now looking in more detail into why we did not pick up sooner that there had been two instances of the use of the racial slur, and why, post the broadcast, further action was not taken to edit or remove the programme from iPlayer,” he said.

He vowed: “The BBC will learn lessons from this incident and ensure appropriate action is taken to avoid such an incident happening again.”