Beyond Apology: What the BAFTAs, the BBC and the Tourette’s Controversy Reveal About Guardrails

On Sunday night the BAFTA Awards took place and despite multiple wins and a continued celebration of culture and craft, none of those moments dominated social media over the past week. What did was an example of inclusion colliding with insufficient operational design.

One of the films BAFTA honoured was I Swear, a documentary about Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson. The film centres on his life with Tourette’s, including coprolalia, the involuntary vocalisation of socially inappropriate or offensive words. Its purpose is to reduce stigma and deepen understanding of a condition that remains widely misunderstood.

During the ceremony, while Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage presenting, Davidson shouted the N-word as an involuntary tic.

The programme was broadcast on a two-hour delay, a mechanism designed precisely to prevent offensive language or other incidents from reaching air. Chief content officer Kate Phillips later confirmed that the edit team had removed other audible offensive slurs but left this one in by mistake. Attendees had been pre-warned about possible verbal tics and Alan Cumming referenced Tourette’s during the broadcast. None of that lessened the impact once the word reached viewers, and John Davidson himself feels "that they should have been aware of what to expect from Tourette’s and worked harder to prevent anything that I said from being included in the broadcast."

The reaction from viewers was immediate and raw, with understandable dismay and hurt. A racial slur landing during what is supposed to be a celebration of creative brilliance unexpectedly reactivates trauma for many. In a climate of rising xenophobia and racial hostility, that impact is amplified.

At the same time, much of the fallout has come at the expense of Davidson himself, with undoubted ableism surfacing online, a bitter irony given that the film aimed to educate precisely on that misunderstanding. There has also been dismay at the idea of asking a man with Tourette’s and coprolalia to apologise for something involuntary. The responsibility questions and focus on apologies are valid and make sense as a focal point: how do you acknowledge harm without implying intent? What does regret mean when an act is involuntary?

But responsibility should not rest solely on individual onus. The more consequential question is structural: how did this happen at all and how did it pass through the BAFTA and BBC systems designed to prevent it?

Considering prior knowledge of Davidson’s attendance, where was the safeguarding? Why was the edit missed? When Delroy Lindo later said he and Jordan “did what we had to do” and continued presenting, but wished someone from BAFTA had spoken to them afterwards, what does that suggest about how the moment was handled in real time?

A mitigation system existed. It worked in one instance and failed in another. The response followed the event rather than pre-empting it

That is operational fragility.

Layered onto this is an uncomfortable comparison. Expressions such as “Free Palestine” had reportedly been removed from broadcasts. That context now sits beside a racial slur that was not. Whether the situations are technically identical or not, the juxtaposition intensifies scrutiny of editorial judgment. 

When a system falters selectively, fragility is then no longer read as technical but instead as a values misalignment.

This is organisational lag

What unfolded at the BAFTAs is not best understood as outrage or optics. It is better understood as lag.

Between 2020 and 2022, many institutions moved quickly to centre inclusion. Language evolved. Commitments were made and representation became an explicit goal for many. Opportunity platforms widened for different communities.

Despite the visibility of those commitments and in some cases tangible changes, what often moves more slowly is the architecture required to sustain them under pressure.

Inclusion invites complexity. It interrogates difference and asks organisations to rework long-standing ways of operating to involve people from different backgrounds more meaningfully. That complexity requires humility and integrated decision systems, not surface alignment.

In more recent years we have also seen a step back from DEI terminology and from some of those public commitments, alongside a rise in the culture wars and “anti-woke” discourse. Some initiatives have been folded into existing work. Others have been reduced or quietly deprioritised under financial pressure.

Yet if the past few years have demonstrated anything, it is that a noticeable lack of inclusion carries reputational risk. So does inclusion that is not properly engineered. What happened here illustrates the latter.

Inclusion requires step-by-step involvement from the communities most affected, embedded into planning, editorial judgement, rehearsal scenarios and real-time authority structures. At the BAFTAs, the intention to include was visible. The operational discipline required to hold the consequences of that inclusion was less so.

We can see 

• A delay system existed but proved fragile.

• Safeguarding appeared present but not fully or properly integrated.

• Response mechanisms were activated after impact rather than anticipating it.

  
  

This is how organisational lag manifests. Showing itself in the gap between declared values and engineered process.

In a climate where inclusion work is already scrutinised, that gap is rarely interpreted as technical. It is interpreted as ideological inconsistency.

That is the risk leaders need to understand. The question is not whether to include. It is instead whether your systems are built for what inclusion brings.