A BBC anchor has apologized after she was caught on camera giving the middle finger before starting a report on Boris Johnson. In the now viral clip, Maryam Moshiri can be seen clearly and undeniably flipping the bird on screen. There’s nothing subtle about it as you can see below:
Been a while since a middle finger gesture made it on to BBC News… pic.twitter.com/eS5hOJ0PYY
— Clean Feed @ The TV Room (@cleanfeed_ttvr) December 6, 2023
Not knowing that the silly joke was broadcasted to viewers on Wednesday evening, Moshiri apologized the next morning and explained how the whole thing happened.
“Hey, I’m so sorry about this,” Moshiri wrote on Twitter. “I was having a private joke with the team in the gallery and pretending to count down as the director was counting me down from 10-0… including the fingers to show the number. When we got to 1 I turned finger around as a joke and did not realise that this would be caught on camera.”
Moshiri is clearly mortified by the private gag being seen by viewers, and now, the entire internet. In her defense, the moment does seem like an innocent bit of co-worker mischief that, unfortunately, was the victim of bad timing.
“It was a private joke with the team and I’m so sorry it went out on air!” she wrote. “It was not my intention for this to happen and I’m sorry if I offended or upset anyone. I wasn’t ‘flipping the bird’ at viewers or even a person really. It was a silly joke that was meant for a small number of my mates.”