Sabrina Carpenter Censored for Making BBC Joke on BBC

How quickly can you get your Live Lounge taken down, pop quiz?

BY Megan LaPierrePublished Feb 27, 2023

The trouble with acronyms is that there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet. Inevitably, some short-from abbreviations of different things will be the same. While across the pond for a BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge session, American pop singer and former Girl Meets World star Sabrina Carpenter decided to make a play on this — and ended up getting censored by the broadcasting company.

Carpenter released her Island Records debut emails i can't send last summer, which includes a track called "Nonsense" — a pretty perfect, pure, unadulterated pop song that truly takes its title to heart, soaring in a self-referential chorus octave jump.

BBC Radio 1 invited her to perform it (alongside a cover of "Late Night Talking" by Harry Styles) in a Live Lounge session, perhaps not knowing that the singer has been known to get even goofier with the song when she sings it live by making up custom outros.

On the recorded version of "Nonsense," the song winds down with Carpenter singing the lyrics, "This song catchier than chickenpox is / I bet your house is where my other sock is / Woke up this morning, thought I'd write a pop hit / How quickly can you take your clothes off, pop quiz?" But she came up with a special little outro for her Live Lounge performance — via the British Broadcasting Corporation, for the record — and well, it was too nonsensical for the company.

"I'm American, I am not British / So BBC, it stands for something different," Carpenter subbed in. Hopefully, I don't have to explain the other meaning of BBC she was referring to, if you've ever hit the search bar on a porn site (the uninitiated are welcome to check Urban Dictionary).
 

Respectably, she also threw in an "innit" joke for good measure. But it was probably the BBC thing that offended the broadcaster so much that, after initially posting the video on their YouTube channel on Friday (February 24), they took it down shortly afterwards. Today, they've re-uploaded the performance with Carpenter's outro edited out.

You can watch that — sans BBC-related dick jokes — below.

 

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