Damien

Of course they are offensive and ridiculously absurd comments to make.

I think it's misleading to make this an issue of his program not having ethnically diverse characters, I don't think anyone has complained at their absence, but it's a curious policy to dismiss the suggestion altogether in the way he did. He suggested that the audience would have a problem with it: "I'm trying to make something that appeals to a certain audience, which seems to succeed. And I don't want to change it.".

The worst passage was were he inferred that the program was the last bastion of Englishness as a reason for not adding multi-ethnic characters. This clings in an old-fashioned and frankly racist view that being English means being white.