The BBC has issued an apology after leaked footage of tonight’s ‘Blue Planet II’ revealed that NONE of the animals featured will be wearing a Remembrance Day poppy.
The ‘Coral Reefs’ episode due to be aired this evening will highlight the incredible array of creatures that live in the world’s tropical seas, though it is understood that not a single one of them will be commemorating the war dead by wearing a red plastic flower. A BBC insider told the Herald that attempts had been made to edit the footage in order to add the poppies retrospectively, but the sheer number of animals appearing had made it a technical impossibility.
“You try digitally adding hundreds of tiny red poppies to a shoal of fish,” said production assistant, Ed Stevens.
“And fish are easy. We didn’t know where to start with the corals. Is it a poppy per polyp or just one for the whole coral? And what about anemones? Where on an anemone would you put a bloody poppy?”
Stevens told our reporter that a crew had even visited the local aquarium with a view to putting poppies onto captive animals and then adding them to the footage.
“The staff at Bristol Aquarium were very accommodating but the sharks, not so much,” he said.
“We almost got a poppy attached to one of the smaller sharks but then Dave Phillips, our cameraman, stood on a stingray and all hell broke loose. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he bent over to pick up the red poppy he thought he had dropped only to realise that it was actually his finger.
“That won’t make it into the programme but it’ll slot nicely into our Christmas blooper reel.”
Meanwhile, a small group of protesters gathered outside the BBC’s Natural History Unit this afternoon to express their anger at the perceived “lack of respect for are (sic) troops”.
“This is just another example of the biased BBC pushing its liberal agenda on us,” said part-time taxi driver and full-time fucknugget, Darren Fudd, 36.
“If it’s not bad enough that they’re shoving transsexual fish down our throats, they’re providing a platform for animals that have no respect for our way of life. What’s wrong with filming British fish, eh? Not gay enough for ya?”
The other protester present, Beryl Fudd, 52, also expressed anger that none of the creatures living on the reefs appeared to stop to respect the two-minute silence.
“We all know what that’s about, don’t we? I’m not going to say it, because you’ll just call me racist, but you know what I mean,” she said, winking, before adjusting the massive poppy pinned to her jacket.
“You ever seen a parrotfish eating bacon? No? Exactly.”
Speaking over the phone from its home on the Great Barrier Reef, one of the cuttlefish to feature in tonight’s programme told the Herald that the lack of visible poppies was actually down to timing.
“We actually filmed that footage months ago, and had no idea that it would be going out on Remembrance Sunday,” said the brightly-coloured cephalopod.
“To be fair I do usually wear a poppy, even though these days the whole thing’s been hijacked by the sort of ‘patriotic’ arseholes who say things like ‘Hitler had the right idea, he just picked the wrong religion’.
“You want to respect and remember the people who fought and died for our freedom? Easy – stop buying the Daily Mail.”
