The BBC's The Repair Shop halted work on a notebook belonging to the late comedian Bob Monkhouse after discovering it contained inappropriate jokes, the programme's production company has confirmed.
The item, which included handwritten quips and cartoons dating back to the 1960s, was brought in by Colin Edmonds, who inherited it under Monkhouse's will. However, when the production team reviewed the notebook, they deemed its content unsuitable for broadcast and scrapped the segment midway through filming.
Joanna Ball, managing director of Ricochet, the production company behind the show, said: 'We planned to fix the joke book, but when we got it to the barn and saw it in its entirety, we realised it contained many jokes that were not appropriate for a programme. We explained this to the family and returned the book to them.'
The notebooks were previously at the centre of a high-profile theft in 1995, when they went missing from a BBC locker. Monkhouse offered a £10,000 reward for their return, and they were recovered two years later. Edmonds previously described the journals as 'of their time', noting that some content acceptable in the 1970s would not be said today.
Ricochet emphasised that decisions on which items to feature are part of the normal production process, and that both the production team and the BBC agreed on the decision. The segment was not part of a tribute episode, as previously speculated, but rather a standard instalment of the show.
