Atkinson race row shocks Celebrity Big Brother producers

Celebrity Big Brother producers today expressed surprise that Ron Atkinson had said something racist on the show. "It came right out of the blue," a spokesperson confirmed. "It's not as if, outside football, he's most well known for having publicly made a racist remark. Mainly we wanted him on the show to talk about his remarkable 1991 Rumbelows Cup campaign with Sheffield Wednesday. It never occurred to us he might say something controversial.

"All this is going to do is attract a lot of publicity to the show, which is the last thing we wanted. But we've used Big Brother's system of arbitrary made-up rules to give him a formal warning, and we consider that an end to the matter."