James Naughtie is a Radio 4 presenter who works on the Today Programme. He had rather an unfortunate experience on Monday when he mispronounced a name. He was referring to Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary and accidentally started the man’s surname with the wrong letter, which happened to be a very offensive swear word.
The Culture Secretary was being interviewed by James Naughtie on the show just before 8am when the presenter slipped up and used the first letter of his job title to start his surname. He was quick to apologise but the two men actually found it quite funny, so it seems from the Tweet that Mr Hunt put out afterwards. Of course Mr Naughtie was quick to apologise, explaining that it was not a word that he liked either and it was a case of getting his words in a tangle.
The interview was all about Mr Hunt’s ideas on how he will organise faster broadband delivery in the UK and despite the seriousness of their discussion and the apology made, there were still some complaints about what happened. Some viewers did see the funny side though and with the word being said as a genuine mistake and the offended viewers did not really have any reason to complain. With the show being live, there was no way it could have been edited out.
However, they may have had reason to complain when later in the day on Andrew Marr’s show ‘Start the Week’ he talked about the slip up and actually said the word. He explained that it was not something he had meant to do but found it difficult to talk about the incident without using the word. Hopefully Mr Hunt will not find that he is now continuously called the unfortunate word in error.