31 December,2009 07:33 AM IST | | Agencies
A British radio presenter has been sacked after he pulled the plug on Queen Elizabeth II's traditional Christmas Day speech, telling listeners it was "boring".
Tom Binns has lost his job at Birmingham radio station BRMB after a number of listeners complained over his interruption of the monarch's traditional December 25 broadcast to Britain and the Commonwealth.
"Two words: Bor-ring," he said on air as he stopped the broadcast, before quipping "from one Queen to another..." as he put on Last Christmas by pop duo Wham, featuringu00a0 gay-singer George Michael.
Binns explained that the incident occurred after the Queen's speech a decades-old tradition still watched by millions of Britons and others every year came on at a point when he had expected a regular news bulletin.
"I was working on my own on Christmas; I'd even had to let myself into the studio. After the guy before me finished, we should have taken the news from Sky, and then my show would start," Binns said.
"But instead of the news, we got the Queen's speech. I knew it shouldn't be there, but having never heard it before, I didn't know how long it was going to go on for.
"I'm not trained to make editorial decisions, but I decided to get rid of it and make a joke. I said, "Two words: bor-ring',"u00a0 he admitted.
Binns then went into an old riff about "how people say the royal family are good for tourism, but the French beheaded theirs and people still visit France," before cueing up the Wham song.
Angry listener
He added that one listener got really angry, "he sent me a message saying he hoped I'd get killed by a roadside bomb... but other than that almost all the texts we received were in support of what I'd done."
The radio station's parent company, the Orion Media Group programme, said the DJ's comments were
"inappropriate."
"Tom will now not be featuring again on our radio stations," said its programme and marketing director, David Lloyd.
Binns added, "Nobody would have tuned in to hear the Queen's speech; and I tried to deal with it in a funny way. After all, they employ comedians to make jokes."
