EXCLUSIVE: The chair of the BBC attended the BAFTA Film Awards on Sunday night.
Samir Shah was in the auditorium at the Royal Festival Hall but played no part in preventing John Davidson’s involuntary N-word interruption from being broadcast on BBC One, Deadline can reveal.
The BBC has been heavily criticized for failing to edit out Tourette syndrome campaigner Davidson’s intervention from the awards show, which aired two hours after the ceremony took place. The BBC then subsequently failed to remove the BAFTAs stream from iPlayer for a further 15 hours.
Davidson’s verbal tics were frequent and directed at a number of individuals on stage, but the fallout has focused on his racial slur when Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting an award.
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The BBC and producer Penny Lane’s position is that the slur was not heard in the outside broadcast truck during recording. But since Monday morning, sources have questioned why no one from the BBC or the production team was able to relay a message from the auditorium to the gallery to ensure the N-word was edited out of the broadcast.
Shah, it turns out, was present. He is a member of BAFTA and was at the ceremony in this capacity as a guest. According to a source close to Shah, the chair was sat towards the back of the room, and while being aware of shouting and noise, he wasn’t clear what was being said.
Deadline journalists sat towards the back of the room said the N-word and other slurs were audible, as were gasps when Davidson made his involuntary tics. As Deadline revealed earlier this week, Warner Bros. Discovery executives also heard the outburst and raised immediate concerns with BAFTA. They were assured that a message would be passed on to the BBC. BAFTA declined to comment. Both the BBC and BAFTA have since launched reviews.
Compounding the issue was the fact that a microphone was placed close to Davidson, a decision he questioned in an interview with Variety earlier this week, adding: “I had an expectation that the BBC would physically control the sound at the awards on Sunday.”
It should be noted that Shah is not a BBC staff member and isn’t part of the executive. BBC content boss Kate Phillips, and outgoing Director General Tim Davie, were not present on the night, we understand.
Phillips told staff on Tuesday that the N-word “aired in error and we would never have knowingly allowed this to be broadcast,” while revealing a second racial slur was edited out.
Shah has been on the frontlines of numerous BBC scandals over the past year or so. After the Glastonbury Bob Vylan saga, for which Davie was in this instance present at the event when the controversy erupted, Shah said it was “unquestionably an error of judgement” that the feed beaming out Bob Vylan’s antisemitic remarks was not cut.
He was more involved with the Donald Trump Panorama editing SNAFU, which led to the resignations of Davie and the head of BBC News and to criticism of Shah and the board for a labored response to a problem that needed knocking on the head quickly. This led the board to give its “unanimous” backing to Shah. His predecessor, Richard Sharp, was forced to resign over links to Boris Johnson.
The BBC declined to comment on Shah’s appearance at the BAFTAs.