This time the Beeb has gone too far. It’s cancelled Santa.

A ludicrous accusation? Yes, but not half as ridiculous as the BBC’s decision to censor sketches from the children’s show Horrible Histories, including an episode that features the writer Terry Deary as Father Christmas.

If you’ve never seen Horrible Histories, you’re missing out. The show first aired in 2009 and, based on Deary’s series of more than 60 books, starred the team who went on to make the beloved BBC1 sitcom Ghosts.

Every episode is crammed with educational, witty and scabrous sketches, brilliantly written and performed and, above all, historically accurate.

The most revolting facts from history supply the basis for silly re-enactments, the muckier the better. Overflowing chamber pots, farting court jesters, gruesome disembowelments and dank dungeons, Horrible Histories revels in all of it.

Generations of children have lapped this up since the first book appeared in 1993. Deary made learning feel transgressive. History isn’t supposed to be this much fun.

If you’ve never seen Horrible Histories, you’re missing out. Every episode is crammed with educational, witty and scabrous sketches aimed to teach the younger generation about history

Yet the corporation has now removed or edited episodes of the show on iPlayer to meet its ‘guidelines’ – the latest in a series of bizarre cancellations.

These include scenes featuring blackface in The League Of Gentlemen and Little Britain, and an exchange between John Cleese as Basil and Ballard Berkeley as the antediluvian Major, in Fawlty Towers.

No show is too popular to be safe from the Beeb’s po-faced mission to save us from jokes that might offend.

The recently banned Horrible Histories episode (part six of the first series) includes a satirical skit on no-win-no-fee adverts for injury lawyers, which were endemic on daytime television in the Noughties.

A small child in rags is seen working a gigantic factory machine. ‘Reconstruction!’ blares a caption, as the wheels trap the boy’s hand. He shows us the bandaged, bloody remains with two missing fingers. ‘He got ZERO compensation!’ brags the voiceover for the imaginary insurance company, Victorian Claims Direct.

Another segment satirises the Roman system of chaining captives to oars in galley ships. A stewardess takes the slaves through safety procedures, budget airline style: ‘Manacles fasten like this “– click! –” and should be tightened until they are extremely painful.’

The most innocuous of the banned sketches has Mathew Baynton as a snooty butler and Simon Farnaby (now writer of the Paddington films) as a chimney sweep, summoned to a London mansion to deal with a blocked flue. ‘Not to worry,’ he declares cheerily. ‘I fink a Number Six should clear it.’

Number Six is a boy with soot-blackened face and hair. ‘Git up there!’ orders the sweep. ‘Remember what I told yer.’

‘Try not to die,’ recites the boy. He finds the blockage and dislodges it – a bigger boy, and then a teen and, finally, Father Christmas, played by Deary, who emerges spluttering in clouds of smoke. It’s bewildering that anyone could think that offensive.

How the BBC arrives at the decision to haul these sketches off iPlayer is equally a mystery. The Corporation’s press office issued a statement yesterday: ‘Edits to programmes on BBC iPlayer are made on a case-by-case basis to ensure they adhere to our editorial guidelines and reflect audience expectations today. This approach is common practice across the industry.’

One censored sketch depicted a young boy as a chimney sweep who was forced to climb a blocked flue and clear it

Supposedly, the censorship is done in consultation with show makers, and the process is not overseen by a specific department.

Deary himself is wisely staying well out of it. He has previously said: ‘No comment. I just write the books.’

Whether the bans are done in response to protests is not clear. Perhaps some parent has been appalled by Horrible Histories – that was rather the point, after all. But why would the Beeb take a complaint seriously?

Could it really be the flippant treatment of slavery? Few topics are more sensitive, but this was a send-up of Roman cruelty two millennia ago, which inflicted suffering on people of all races.

Surely it isn’t the fact that Farnaby and his six-year-old apprentice had their faces smeared with soot? There’s nothing racist about a Victorian chimney sweep who’s never had a wash in his life.

Baynton addressed this four years ago, saying: ‘We didn’t do blackface, but you could argue that we did. Because I played Egyptians, for example, where you’d get a spray tan, essentially, and stand in your pants.’

If that’s unforgivable, it’s hard to know why episode eight of series two is still available. Baynton plays an Ancient Egyptian teacher, in nothing but a white loincloth and Amy Winehouse eye make-up, teaching hieroglyphics to a class of apparently North African teens.

The actor’s skin has a metallic bronze sheen. Watch this sketch with caution: it features a parody of the Jackson 5’s hit A-B-C that is so infuriatingly catchy, you’ll be humming it all day.

Baynton also pointed out, in an interview with the Oxford students’ newspaper Cherwell in 2022, that the core cast of Horrible Histories was ‘a bunch of white people’. Others included Martha Howe-Douglas, Ben Willbond, Jim Howick and Laurence Rickard.

This uniform whiteness clearly discomforts the BBC, which issued a hand-wringing statement in 2024: ‘Horrible Histories is a comedy sketch show that uses a troupe of actors across a variety of roles and since it began on the BBC 15 years ago, we have done a lot of work to increase diverse representation within the cast and we now explore a wider range of global history stories to authentically represent our audiences.’

David Mitchell and Robert Webb in their now-censored BBC comedy series That Mitchell and Webb Look

Inconsistent and illogical though it is, fear of seeming racist does appear to be driving this latest censorship.

Earlier this month, iPlayer also ditched 11 sketches by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, from their Bafta-winning comedy series That Mitchell And Webb Look, several of which involved blackface.

One of the banned routines featured a Civil War re-enactment society that, bored of playing Roundheads and Cavaliers, restage a pitched battle between rebels and government forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Another imagined a woman in a burka going on a TV makeover show called How Not What to Look Like.

In both sketches there was no apparent racist intent. Quite the opposite – the duo are the epitome of arch, Cambridge Footlights wits, whose knowing humour is the antithesis of end-of-the-pier bawdiness.

In the re-enactment scene Webb asks: ‘Are you absolutely sure that this isn’t racist?’

A BBC spokeswoman said of the episodes: ‘This is a 20-year-old sketch show; in consultation with the programme makers, we have included the ones that still work today and not the ones that don’t.’

The makeover sketch ends with a prescient conversation off-camera between Mitchell (who plays the woman in the burka) and his co-star. ‘David,’ mutters Webb, ‘aren’t we just taking the p*** out of people’s sincerely held beliefs?’

‘Well, maybe,’ his friend replies, ‘but I think you can worry too much about this kind of thing.’

They were being ironic, of course. It seems you can never worry too much about this kind of thing… especially if you’re the BBC.