Christopher Biggins has made an apology after having been removed from Celebrity Big Brother following a Holocaust ‘joke’ he made to a fellow housemate.
The 67-year-old actor told Katie Waissel, who is Jewish, “you better be careful or they’ll be putting you in a shower and taking you to a room”.
Channel 5 decided the comment was likely to cause “widespread offence” and removed Biggins from the Big Brother House.
Biggins’ apology was “tearful”. He said “I am mortified by what’s happened, really mortified. Most of my friends, in fact, are Jewish. I apologised to Big Brother and Katie”. Whilst his comments were not necessarily malicious, and may well have been a case of poor judgement, it is incredibly damaging for Jewish people to have the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews be treated as an appropriate topic for humour, especially when it is directed towards them.
Biggins, who is gay, has also attracted controversy having made comments deemed to be offensive to bisexuals. He said in a conversation that Bisexuals are the “worst type” and implied that they were just in denial about being homosexual, as well as linking them to the spread of HIV/AIDS
Biggins will be visiting Auschwitz in the near future, a trip that will hopefully give him some perspective on his comments. He claims to have been planning the trip since before the incident occurred,