Prince Harry is well known for being able to take a joke, but maybe this one crossed a line.
A comedy show in Britain is being accused of degrading the royal family after including a sexually explicit joke about the prince in one of its sketches.
At one point during Monday’s broadcast of Fresh Meat on Channel 4, one character said to another: “I’ll take you to a place on the King’s Road where Prince Harry got a hand j–– off an assistant manager at Abercrombie & Fitch.”
That was too much for Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell, who told The Telegraph: “The media should not involve the royal family in this sort of thing. It’s inappropriate and degrading, and it demeans the broadcasters that engage in it. It’s just wrong.”
Channel 4 defended the joke, saying the show is a “very irreverent comedy drama” and that the character was simply “attempting to impress his fellow students by ironically boasting about his own privilege.”
Previously, on the BBC’s Have I Got News For You on Oct. 25, guest presenter Jo Brand joked that the Prince snorted cocaine during a bit about Prince George’s godparents.
Brand said: “George’s godparents include Hugh van Cutsem … I presume that’s a nickname as in Hugh van cuts ’em and Harry then snorts ’em.”
Defense minister Anna Soubry called the crack “disgraceful, shoddy, appalling and out of order” and called for an apology.
But the Guardian reports that a spokesman for the BBC said: “Have I Got News For You is a satirical news quiz and the audience is used to the often irreverent humour.”
Adding that, “This line was a play on words as part of a section on the surnames of those involved in the christening and was clearly tongue-in-cheek.”
Harry, 29, who has a reputation for being quite the party prince (as seen in his notorious visit to Las Vegas last year) has not commented on the uproar.
People Magazine
