Come Fly With Me

Some viewers iewers have complained that the Christmas Day show by comedy duo Matt Lucas and David Walliams on BBC1 was racist.

The spoof documentary set in an airport and called Come Fly With Me featured the pair as a range of minority characters.

Lucas darkens his face and wears a beard to play a Muslim worker called Taaj. He also adopts a strong West Indian accent to play a black woman called Precious who works in the coffee shop.

Walliams's roles include a Middle Eastern passenger liaison officer called Moses.

However, some viewers failed to see the funny side and took to internet forums to complain about the programme – the first of a six-part series – likening it to a minstrel show .

The show, broadcast at 10pm, was the second most-watched show on Christmas Day, attracting an audience of 10.3million.

BBC1 bosses said they had not yet established how many complained to the corporation. A BBC spokesman said: Come Fly With Me had a huge audience and many people loved it.

Comedy has a social function and part of that function is to ruffle feathers, said Lucas. On Twitter he added: Like in Little Britain we try to reflect, affectionately, the multicultural Britain we love. No offence is intended.

Rural Australia won't be able to see the new comedy from the stars of Little Britain because TV executives believe it's too sophisticated for them.

Channel Nine's regional affiliates, WIN and NBN Television, have decided that David Walliams and Matt Lucas's airport-based satire Come Fly With Me is inappropriate for their regional audience in NSW. They will instead by shown a repeat of US sitcom Big Bang Theory .

The decision to filter the programming has upset some country viewers. Jess Corbett writes (with original grammar and spelling!):

i think its very unfair to assume that people in regional Australia wont understand the show as we are not sophisticated enough! We go to school and get taught the same things that places like sydney and melbourne do. Just cause we live in the country doesnt mean that be are all stupid bogans. And im sure that some if not most have seen little Britain so im sure that we can understand the show.

Despite weeks of teaser trailers hyping the PG-rated show, NBN head of programming and publicity Kellie Hampton said the network planned to first gauge the reaction in metropolitan markets to see if it was suitable to air.

Prior to getting committed to the idea of ISP website blocking, the Australian government had set up a scheme offering state recommended and subsidised filtering software for parents to install on their family PCs.

The Australian government has now decided to scrap its Voluntary Internet Filtering Grants Program in the 2011 federal budget:

The plan was intended to help give ISPs give consumers an additional filtering option for content that wasn't Refused Classification (RC), but that they still objected to. However there was limited interest among ISPs in the grants, and consumers had a number of filtering options at their disposal, including browser and search engine filters.

The government still plans to push forward with its involuntary, i.e. mandatory, blocking scheme that's been in the works since 2007.