Top 20 Legendary F**k Ups On The BBC

#20: Sherlock Series 4

Before “Stranger Things’” secret finale, there was “Sherlock’s” secret finale, a conspiracy conjured by disheartened fans to explain how the fourth series of the beloved BBC programme had deteriorated so much. Not satisfied to learn that Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss just didn’t have that much of a plan, a theory emerged that there was a secret finale that would explain everything. In the end, though, no secret episode has ever appeared. That really WAS the ending, the fourth series was as bad as they thought, and “Apple Tree Yard” was a completely different show. The mistake here was the BBC giving Steven Moffat so much power in the first place.

#19: Guy Goma

There’s never been a case of mistaken identity more memorable than this one, when a man named Guy Goma turned up to Broadcasting House for a job interview, only to be accidentally identified as technology correspondent Guy Kewney. Kewney was meant to be weighing in on the outcome of the Beatles’ court case against Apple, but was still waiting elsewhere in the building when he saw Goma appear in his place. Goma muddled through – giving some surprisingly auspicious answers about the looming boom in music streaming – and became briefly famous when people realised what had happened. He didn’t get the job, and years on, wants to sue the BBC for royalties.

#18: Gorilla

On this fateful day in 2016, Nicola Sturgeon was in the news once again, having been interviewed on “BBC Breakfast” about the SNP’s attempts to force a second Scottish independence referendum. But somebody in the gallery ran the wrong visual, showing a clip of an escaped gorilla rather than the First Minister of Scotland. Charlie Stayt quickly apologised while Naga Munchetty struggled to keep it together, nodding along while he made the correction. We wonder what happened to the producer or editor who made that mistake, and what Sturgeon thought about it all. The incident spawned memes of the programme mixing up Sturgeon with all kinds of people.

#17: Stephen Doughty

As everybody knows, the BBC isn’t supposed to get involved with politics. It often does, but it tries not to draw attention to itself when it does. One memorable incident where the mask came off, however, was when the Beeb’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg orchestrated the live resignation of Shadow Foreign Minister Stephen Doughty from the Labour frontbench in 2016. It came immediately before that day’s PMQs, leaving the shadow cabinet in disarray, with the Labour Party condemning the BBC for the way it – and Kuenssberg herself – had behaved. According to Doughty himself, he did it this way to head-off the party’s spin doctors, while the BBC insisted that nobody had encouraged Doughty to resign so it was all above board.

“Kuenssberg” = Coonz-berg

#16: Gregg Wallace

The mistake here was not investigating and sacking Wallace far sooner, since allegations about him had actually been being made for years. Though he’d already been dropped from another BBC programme, “Inside the Factory”, he continued on “MasterChef” for a while longer, until it became clear that there was an avalanche of complaints, including from many prominent celebrities. However, if Wallace is to be believed, the BBC’s mistake was its producers not realising sooner that he was autistic and protecting him from himself, because he now wants to sue them for discrimination. He’s since reinvented himself as a personal trainer and inspirational fitness influencer.

#15: Nigel Farage’s Bank Account

Controversial as he may be, there’s not actually a law in the UK that if you complain enough about immigration you’re not allowed a Coutts bank account anymore. Be that as it may, BBC News’s business editor, Simon Jack, was chummy enough with the CEO of Coutts that he was given a tip off about Farage’s account being imminently closed. Never mind that closing a bank account because you don’t like somebody is bizarre, but why were somebody’s confidential bank details being discussed with a journalist over dinner in the first place? It was a baffling saga, with the BBC’s reporting contributing to the scandal, and the bank ended up apologising to Farage.

#14: Prince Philip

Apparently not learning anything from the widely panned coverage of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 – which was regarded to have been dull and badly commentated on – the BBC doubled down with its royal rolling news when Prince Philip passed away in 2020. All television stopped on the BBC when news of the Duke of Edinburgh’s death broke, with all the channels playing endless bulletins and documentaries about his life. The BBC got more than 110,000 complaints for the coverage, since it’s understandable that lots of people in the UK might have wanted to watch something other than the same documentary about His Royal Highness over and over again.

#13: Scottish Independence

If the gorilla mishap wasn’t bad enough, 2014 saw the BBC in hot water for taking an even more blatant political stance. Scotland narrowly voted 55% in favour of remaining in the United Kingdom, with plenty of celebrities weighing in on either side of the vote. Throughout the campaign, the BBC was widely regarded to have clearly taken a side against independence, with the Scottish arm of the Corporation seeing its fair share of protestors. It was eventually determined that yes, the BBC WAS biased in favour of maintaining the union, with the “No” vote getting positive coverage and the “Yes” vote getting negative coverage.

#12: Top Gear

The BBC’s actually made a lot of mistakes where “Top Gear” is concerned, including apparently not doing its due diligence about health and safety after numerous high-profile crashes nearly killed its presenters. But the clearest, direct blunder the Corporation made was when it decided not to renew Jeremy Clarkson’s contract after the producer punching incident. Clarkson was dropped and, in solidarity, Hammond and May left the show entirely. When the Chris Evans version of “Top Gear” was a disaster, while “The Grand Tour” gave the trio even greater success, the BBC had quite clearly cut off its nose to spite its face.

#11: Cliff Richard

Another absolutely bizarre scandal was when the BBC turned up to live broadcast a raid on one of the homes of Sir Cliff Richard. Richard had been reported to Operation Yewtree and, in 2014, there was a search on one of his flats that was extensively covered by a BBC helicopter which was tipped off by the police. Nothing was found and Richard soon sued the BBC for violating his privacy by covering the search the way that it did, paying £2 million in the end – though most of that went to cover legal fees. The entire situation was a complete farce, with South Yorkshire Police admitting that getting the Beeb involved was a mistake.

#10: Sachsgate

If this prank call scandal had been an isolated incident, perhaps you could defend the BBC a bit more. But even at the time, it was clear that it wasn’t. Russell Brand, while fronting his radio show and co-presenting with Jonathan Ross, rang up actor Andrew Sachs and made up a rude song about Sachs’s granddaughter, an ex of Brand’s. Brand had to resign, but so did Radio 2’s controller Lesley Douglas, who later had to contend with other allegations about Brand and his professionalism – including that he’d previously urinated into a bottle in the studio. The mistake here was hiring Brand in the first place, especially considering his recent legal troubles.

#9: Nick Griffin

It’s time for questions, with the main one being, why was the leader of the BNP invited onto “Question Time” in the first place? In 2009, Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party – which has at various points proposed policies like deporting everybody in Britain who isn’t white – was brought onto “Question Time”, much to the dismay of the public. The BBC was again accused of giving niche far-right parties huge platforms to espouse their views, while ignoring similarly small parties on the left. In the end, though, Griffin embarrassed himself, and the entire episode ended up being a damp squib.

#8: Sock vs Cookie

It was the most controversial vote the British public ever faced before Brexit came along, when viewers were asked to choose the name of the brand-new “Blue Peter” kitten. Voting via an online poll, producers later said that for most of the poll, the name “Socks” was ahead, until there was a last-minute surge in votes for “Cookie”. Thinking that, for some reason, somebody had fiddled with the “Blue Peter” cat name poll, producers overruled the public and picked “Socks”. The debacle actually led to resignations at the BBC and the show was forced to get a second kitten, which they then DID name Cookie, honouring the vote.

#7: Milton Keynes

As one of the UK’s “New Towns”, Milton Keynes is frequently the butt of jokes. But when those jokes came from the BBC, residents of the city weren’t happy. In two 2024 episodes of “EastEnders”, Whitney Dean travelled to Milton Keynes to reunite with Bianca Jackson during one of her numerous returns to the programme – only for the city to be depicted unfairly, according to its real-life residents. One of them accused the BBC of making it look like a slum, while an MP for Milton Keynes, Ben Everitt, also got involved. He said he was going to talk to the producers and try to convince them to come back to the city and make it look nice.

#6: Gary Lineker

In hindsight, this was extremely farcical, when ex-footballer and “Match of the Day” star Gary Lineker – then the highest-paid broadcaster at the company – was suspended for criticising the Tories on Twitter. The BBC said that it was a violation of impartiality rules for Lineker to have an opinion on his personal account, but what it didn’t anticipate was a walkout from all the other sports presenters in protest. He was eventually reinstated – only to leave for good in 2025 – but not before the BBC was forced to broadcast an edition of “Match of the Day” with absolutely no punditry and only highlights, because all the presenters had gone on strike.

#5: Glastonbury

In 2025, the BBC was busy broadcasting Glastonbury Festival, as it always does. But should the Beeb be responsible for what the performers do, especially considering the BBC isn’t actually involved with organising Glastonbury? According to some, yes, because the Corporation got in hot water for not cutting away from rap duo Bob Vylan’s controversial set. They’d already refused to broadcast Kneecap’s set, but seemed not to realise that Bob Vylan were going to be just as contentious, leading chants about Israel. The BBC eventually apologised and excised Bob Vylan from iPlayer, with the government up in arms at what had been allowed to go out on television.

#4: Martin Bashir

The 1995 edition of “Panorama” Bashir fronted, in which he interviewed Princess Diana, was flawed from the start. It was initially obtained via complete fraud, with Bashir tricking Diana with fake bank statements. But the wider mistake was the way the BBC at large allowed “Panorama” to operate with so much secrecy, with the entire episode being kept hidden from the BBC’s leadership by “Panorama’s” executives. The royal family were so outraged with the BBC that they started letting ITV produce the Christmas speech, and decades on, after investigations, the Corporation was forced to apologise for letting Bashir get away with it.

#3: Paying Huw Edwards

Though he disappeared from screens in 2023, it wasn’t until the following year that Huw Edwards, upon appearing at court, actually resigned from the BBC. During all of that time, Edwards was still being paid his enormous salary, despite the BBC already knowing that he’d been formally charged for making indecent images AND despite there being no chance of him ever returning to broadcasting there. When the papers got hold of this information, the BBC said it had asked him to pay back the £200,000 they’d given him while he awaited his court date. But why on Earth didn’t they sack him from the start?

#2: The Battle of Orgreave

In 1984, striking miners near Rotherham came to blows with South Yorkshire Police, a notoriously violent police force at the time, but the BBC’s coverage left much to be desired. The BBC infamously played the clips out of order, showing miners hurling bricks and rocks at police officers who then charged them with their horses in response. But other people had been filming that day, including the police themselves, clearly showing that the fuzz had resorted to violence before the miners, and the miners were only responding to being charged at. The BBC said only that it was a “mistake”, but not until 1991, seven years later.

#1: Trump vs Panorama

Another mishap from “Panorama”, in 2025, Donald Trump got wind that an entire year previously, “Panorama” had aired a documentary about him which edited together lines from one of his speeches around the January 6th insurrection. He decided that this edit was defamatory, and that he was going to take the BBC to court in Florida, and has most recently demanded $10 billion. Most experts agree that he doesn’t have a defamation case, because the documentary doesn’t seem to have ever gone out in America – the only country that could have voted for him – and also because, the BBC’s solicitors argue, he won the 2024 election mere weeks after the programme had gone out.

Let us know in the comments what memorable BBC mistakes we forgot.