The BBC has been branded “ridiculous” after censoring one of the iconic pop hits of 90s girl group Spice Girls.
In the original version of the song, the Spice Girls sang: “Yellow man in Timbuktu. Colour for both me and you.”
However, the word “yellow” has since been removed by radio broadcasters.
Speaking to GB News, former BBC broadcaster Alex Dyke questioned the move and highlighted other pop songs with “choice” lyrics, asking “when will this stop?”
Dyke told hosts Andrew Pierce and Bev Turner: “This was noticed on Scott Mills’s breakfast show on Radio 2, and they’ve opened up a hornet’s nest with this one. They’ve been there before.
“Do you remember they were trying to get Tom Jones’s Delilah banned? There was a public outcry and they didn’t do it. But no one was trying to ban Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Hey Joe’, which also had lyrics in it that were supposedly about violence to women.”
He asked: “If you’re going to ban this song, are you going to ban Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones? What next? Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen, Dude Looks Like A Lady by Aerosmith – where does this stop?”
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Recalling his own time on BBC Radio and censoring songs, Dyke explained how he had called for The Pogues’s Christmas track Fairytale of New York to be edited, and was “hauled over the coals” for it.
Dyke said: “When I was at the BBC, they were very happy to play on the mid-morning show Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side. That’s got some pretty choice references in it, but that still played. So you need one rule that fits everybody.
“I banned a song that I wasn’t happy with and got hauled over the coals for it by the BBC, and that was the Pogues’s Christmas song. I didn’t agree with the lyrics in that at school pick up time. But this, I think, is ridiculous.”
Delivering her verdict on the censorship, Bev Turner argued that although language does need to “move with the times”, the lyrics in songs released nowadays are “disgusting” in comparison.
Bev argued: “To some extent, language has to evolve with the times. There are words that would be routinely used in maybe a comedy sitcom in the 60s and 70s that would make us gasp now. But the fact that when my children play the music that they like in the car, which is current, American music, the lyrics are disgusting.
“They put it on and I say ‘no, off’, and they’re routinely listening to the n-word, the p-word, the f-word. That is what teenagers are listening to, and we’re worried about a word like that. It’s ridiculous.”
In agreement with Bev, Dyke then made another point about the censorship of certain songs over others: “My message to the BBC is, and I think this is a very serious message, if you are going to ban this record or edit this record, what are you going to do every Christmas with John and Yoko’s Happy Xmas (War is Over), which mentions ‘black and white, yellow and red ones’.
“You can’t not do it for John and Yoko, if you’ve done it to the Spice Girls.”
In 2022, a Radio 2 spokesperson explained the decision, saying: “We are reflecting what we are hearing back from many of our listeners who love the song, but find some of the lyrics jarring.”
