Define offensive before you judge the joke

The BBC upheld complaints over a remark made about Victoria Beckham on Have I Got News For You without ever stating what the remark was. Two viewers found it gratuitously offensive. The corporation agreed. And the entire public judgment rested on a foundation nobody can see — because the actual words, the context around them. The reasoning for why they crossed a line all remain redacted.

This is the shape of a decision that assumes its own correctness before examining what it's deciding. The complaint mechanism treats 'offensive to a named person' as self-evidently actionable, as though the category needs no internal structure. But comedy criticism does not work that way, and comedy writers know it.

The operative distinction in comedy is not offense itself but what the offense targets. A joke about Victoria Beckham's public persona — her calculated brand, her commercial choices, her visibility. Occupies a different category than a joke about her identity. One attacks a decision or a strategy she could change. The other attacks something fixed. This matters because public figures, by entering the public sphere, accept different rules. Their choices become fair game in ways that their skin, their body, their family background, do not. This is not a universal rule. It is a principle that comedy critics and comedians themselves dispute and negotiate constantly. But it is the principle underlying most defensible comedy about named people.

The BBC's silence makes it impossible to know which principle they upheld. Was the remark attacking her career moves, her commercial partnerships, her public image? Or was it a slur about an immutable characteristic. Her appearance, her background, something she cannot undo? The corporation's refusal to specify suggests they may not have distinguished between them at all. They may have simply registered 'person named plus audience complaint' and moved to upheld. This is not proportionate judgment. It is category error treated as decision.

When you make a call about someone's work. Whether a pitch is strong, whether a manuscript crosses a line. You have to articulate where the line actually sits. You cannot point to a boundary without describing what separates one side from the other. The BBC teaches something useful by accident here: silence about your reasoning is not neutrality. It is abdication. You have chosen a standard. Make it visible.