Game Show Hosts Who Are Actually Terrible People

Game shows have been around almost as long as TV itself. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the first game show ever was Spelling Bee, which aired all the way back in 1938. On the show, host Freddie Grisewood tasked people with, wait for it, spelling words. Riveting stuff! And it paved the way for the literally thousands of game shows that have existed since then.

There are all kinds of styles and formats of game shows, everything from tests of physical endurance to games of chance to intellectual endeavors. For all the variety of potential games, there is one tried and true constant — the host. The game show host is usually friendly, upbeat and excels at innocuous banter while explaining the rules and bringing the contestant along for the ride. It's worth remembering that the host you see on TV is just a persona, however, a character these people are playing. In real life, some of these game show hosts can be just awful. They are, after all, just like the rest of us, even if they wear terrible suits and tell jokes that are cornier than your dad's. Some of them are awesome people and some are, well, you'll see.

Way back in 1966, Bob Eubanks started hosting The Newlywed Game. He hosted it off and on for years after that, including stints in the '70s, '80s, '90s, and even the 2000s. The format of the show is pretty simple — a group of newlywed couples are quizzed on how much they know about each other with questions ranging from the mundane to the PG-level risque. It's been an enduring concept for decades and Eubanks was the face of it, playfully digging at the contestants and feigning shock at some of the more saucy answers.

Back in 1989, Eubanks appeared in the Michael Moore documentary Roger and Me, about the downsizing of the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. Eubanks was interviewed because he's a Flint native, and took the opportunity to randomly toss out a joke that was both homophobic and anti-Semitic. In 2012, while hosting a stage parody of the Newlywed Game, Eubanks again made a homophobic joke on tape, according to The Advocate.

The reputation from these jokes and his history of off-color remarks on The Newlywed Game has dogged him since. Good thing his show isn't still taping, or there would probably be petitions for him to be fired.

For a long time, you couldn't discuss game shows on TV without bringing up Bob Barker. The unofficial king of daytime game shows, Barker hosted The Price is Right from 1972 to 2007. He'd actually started hosting games way back in 1956, so he had an incredible run of more than half a century. And while he's long been associated with the high energy and good times of The Price Is Right, there was more going on behind the scenes than most of us realized.

The Price Is Right has a history of using models to showcase the fabulous prizes. Known as "Barker's Beauties," they didn't really say much on the show, just there to look pretty. In 1994, model Dian Parkinson filed a lawsuit against Barker alleging sexual harassment. That suit was dropped later when Parkinson said it was taking a toll on her health. However, this suit was followed by more from model Holly Hallstrom and others.

As Time noted, Barker admitted to having a relationship with Parkinson but claimed it was consensual. Hallstrom's suit was settled and, though Barker called it frivolous, a court agreed she had been unfairly fired for gaining weight and for refusing to spread lies about Parkinson in the media. The details of the settlement weren't made public, but it's safe to assume the price was right.

Dick Clark is a pop culture icon and an American original. Clark did a lot of things — he ran a successful production company that gave the world Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve special every New Year's, and he was the host of The $25,000 Pyramid (later The $100,000 Pyramid, to account for inflation). But that long career nearly ended a bit earlier than it needed to.

Clark's big break was as the host and producer of American Bandstand, a pop music showcase that ran from the '50s until the late '80s. It was in that capacity where Dick Clark got up to some shady business dealings ... and got caught. In 1960, the House Committee on Legislative Oversight investigated Clark during the "payola" scandal, an especially skeevy moment in the recording industry's history that revealed an elaborate system of illegal and quasi-legal kickbacks and ownership stakes. Findings showed that Clark, who hosted all kinds of up-and-coming acts on American Bandstand, also had a financial stake in many of those artists' record labels — 33 different music companies, in fact. So, when a Bandstand appearance propelled record sales for certain acts, Clark profited. "I think the crime I have committed, if any, is that I made a great deal of money in a short time on little investment," Clark actually told Congress. By the time Clark testified, he had, at the behest of Bandstand's network, ABC, sold off his ownership stakes in those record labels, and so he walked away without punishment.

Back in the '70s and '80s, Chuck Woolery was the quintessential game show host. He had perfectly coiffed hair, excelled at witty banter, and had a smooth, talk-radio kind of voice that made it seem like he knew what was going on. From a stint as the original host of Wheel of Fortune to his famous run on Love Connection and Scrabble, he really came across as a good and reliable guy.

Fast-forward to the age of social media, and Woolery began sharing his political opinions online. While there's nothing wrong with being conservative, he took things too far with some of his more outlandish and aggressive beliefs. As Huffington Post detailed, on a radio show once with former Representative Michelle Bachmann, Woolery explained his belief that minorities don't need civil rights. The idea of gay rights or civil rights are unnecessary, Woolery believes, because all people have inalienable rights. He went on to say everyone gets discriminated against and he knows what it's like too because he's old.

Woolery's comments on Twitter have garnered him accusations of anti-Semitism and prejudice against Islam as well. Woolery has defended himself against claims of racism and even claimed ignorance on any knowledge of past racism in politics, inviting many people to set him straight according to Huffington Post.

Family Feud seems to have really taken off in popularity under the hosting of Steve Harvey. With Harvey at the helm the show has even had a number of primetime celebrity specials including big name stars like Shaquille O'Neal and Kanye West. But as charming and fun as Steve Harvey can be on camera, he's no stranger to controversy behind the scenes.

A staff email Harvey sent to the crew of his daytime talk show was leaked to the press, and it demonstrated the level of control Harvey expects to have over his employees. Variety reprinted the message, and it includes instructions like "do not come to my dressing room unless invited" and "my security team will stop everyone from standing at my door who have the intent to see me or speak to me." In total, about a dozen points all essentially make the same point — do not go near Steve Harvey unless you have permission ahead of time.

The Hollywood Reporter points out how Harvey joked on his show about how women would never want to date Asian men. Other highlights of Harvey's least respectable views range from blatant sexism to homophobia. Survey says: Steve Harvey isn't as nice as he plays on TV.

Few game show hosts are as memorable as the Family Feud's Richard Dawson if for no other reason than Dawson would occasionally make fun of contestants, which is still a staple on Family Feud over 40 years later. He even once acknowledged himself as "smarmy" in a People interview. Dawson also had a penchant for locking lips with almost every single woman who appeared on the show. Not in a face-eating way necessarily, but the man made it his mission to kiss every woman he could, which likely wouldn't fly these days. But despite all that, Dawson was charming and funny and he seemed like a likeable enough guy. But that was on camera.

Behind the scenes, rumors of Dawson's behavior were a little less than complimentary. In the book Television Game Show Hosts, author David Baber details how Dawson's ego began to grow as the show blew up. He would clash with producers over whether contestant answers qualified, and he'd tell long stories that ate up screen time and jokes that needed to be edited out. He'd get angry when lightbulbs were burned out. At one point he even forbade a show producer from coming on set and hired his own daughter-in-law to fill the role. In a number of ways, he became the parody of a game show host he ended up playing in the movie The Running Man.

For a hot minute in 2001, the game show Weakest Link was the hottest thing on American television. Part of the charm was host Anne Robinson, the antithesis of the usual friendly game show host in that she was a stern, stone-faced British person who mocked failed contestants and dismissed them with a curt, "You are the Weakest Link, goodbye!" At the end of the show, Robinson bid farewell to viewers with a wry smile, implying the whole mean thing was just an act. 

But maybe it wasn't. In October 2017, Robinson weighed in on the then-young #MeToo movement, which aims to call out and eradicate sexual harassment and other awful behavior, particularly in the workplace. Back in her day, four decades ago, they "had a much more robust attitude to men behaving badly," she told BBC Radio 4. "In my day we gave them a slap and told them to grow up." She also called out "the fragility of the women who are unable to deal with the treachery of the workplace." In June 2018, she doubled down on her comments, saying she "certainly didn't run crying to the loo" if a man "tried to pat my bum," according to the Independent. She added: "I was also really shocked that women further up the pole weren't doing more to curtail it." So yeah, Robinson thinks its women's fault that women get harassed (or worse). That's, as they say, problematic.

Alec Baldwin does a lot of things. The former big-screen heartthrob won a bunch of Emmys as a comedy star, both for his work as NBC executive Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock and as President Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live. More recently, he's served as the genial host of ABC's fun primetime revival of Match Game. Off-camera, Baldwin is something of a hothead. In 2013, he ran after a photographer trying to take his picture and levied a profane, homosexual slur. In April 2014, Baldwin got in a fight with an ex-aide to Mitt Romney, which ended in some more anti-gay language.

Baldwin doesn't even save his vitriol for strangers. In 2007, a voicemail Baldwin left for his 11-year-old daughter, Ireland, leaked to the media. Apparently, she missed a scheduled phone call from dear old dad, and he came unglued. "I don't give a damn that you're 12 years old or 11 years old, or a child, or that your mother is a thoughtless pain in the a** who doesn't care about what you do," he raged, referring to his former wife, Kim Basinger. He topped it off by calling his flesh and blood a "thoughtless little pig." The message was so nasty that a family law judge issued an order that temporarily prevented Baldwin from contacting his daughter.

The Wheel of Fortune has been on TV since 1975, back when it was hosted by Chuck Woolery. Woolery left the show in 1981 and from then on it was hosted by Pat Sajak. Sajak, a former weatherman, only left the job briefly to host his own talk show but has otherwise remained at the helm of the show for most of its run.

While his onscreen chemistry with both Vanna White and the contestants is mostly innocuous stuff, off screen things have gotten a little contentious. On Twitter, which allows anyone and everyone to speak without really thinking first, Sajak has loudly and aggressively espoused his disbelief in the science behind climate change. In May 2014, Salon noted that Sajak wrote "I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends." How racism factored into this is anyone's guess.

Sajak later tried to backtrack his comment saying it was just meant as a joke, the "racist" part tossed in to highlight the name-calling directed at those who don't believe in science, but Vice dug into his posting history and noted that he's been denying climate change for quite some time.

Most people know Ben Stein from one of two places — Ferris Bueller's Day Off or as the game show host of Win Ben Stein's Money. Stein has actually been in law and politics for years, however, and was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. That said, Stein is also known for having some pretty questionable ideas.

Stein made a movie called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed that was critical of evolution. And that's fine, but as the USA Today review notes, the movie portrays anyone who supports evolution as un-American ... and links evolution to eugenics and the Nazi party. The Anti-Defamation League actually released a statement denouncing the film for its misappropriation of the Holocaust.

Stein once wrote a defense of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French politician and former manager of the International Monetary Fund. Strauss-Kahn has been accused of numerous sexual assaults over the years and, though never found guilty, he has settled at least one civil suit against an accuser out of court. Rather than dealing in facts, Stein's defense rested on the idea that Strauss-Kahn was either too important to sexually assault someone, or that it's just not a thing people like him do. Yes, if we've learned anything in our modern era, it's that rich men are terrified of abusing their power over women.

If you like Family Feud at all, you have Match Game to thank for it. Match Game is where Richard Dawson got his start in game shows before going on to host Feud, and it's also the inspiration for the whole show. Basically, Family Feud was an adapted version of Match Game's final round, even though the rest of the game format was very different. On that show, a contestant has to match fill-in-the-blank answers with a celebrity from a panel of guests, all under the helpful guidance of host Gene Rayburn.

Match Game was very much a product of the 1970s and looking back on it years later can induce some serious cringe. Host Gene Rayburn routinely engaged in banter that, by today's standards, would qualify as racist, sexist, or just generally offensive. Clips show Rayburn acting like what could be at best described as a dirty old man. In one clip he seems to actually grope panelist Elaine Joyce then laugh it off when she calls him out on it. In a different clip he makes Joyce stand up to show off her outfit. Another time he dropped two jokes in a row about Fannie Flag's breasts. In addition to the writing on the show constantly playing on innuendo, Rayburn was definitely into making things uncomfortable for some members of the audience.

Way up north during the 1980s, Canada was airing its own string of exceptionally '80s game shows that suffered from a lot of the terrible wardrobes and bad haircuts you'd expect from '80s TV. One of those shows was called Just Like Mom and featured children as the contestants along with their mothers. The pairs had to match questions and then mom had to eat some gross "bake-off" items to guess which one their own kid made. They also had to deal with host Fergie Olver.

In years after the show aired, clips began to circulate on YouTube that really showcased how off-putting Olver was as a host. In particular, he had a habit of very frequently kissing the little girls on the show. Often he would ask for a kiss and regardless of whether the girl agreed, he'd proceed to give one. Most of these girls are between 6 and 12 years old, and most very clearly don't want to be touched by Olver as they literally recoil from him. But he kept doing it.

Maclean's magazine in Canada discussed the issue, pointing out that audiences likely never noticed how weird it was at the time, but when it's run all together it's exceptionally uncomfortable to watch.

Viewers might expect a certain amount of insults to be flung at contestants in reality and competitions shows like The X Factor — especially considering it's headed by the music guru everyone loves to hate: Simon Cowell. But it turns out there are hosts who have crossed lines that even Cowell just glances at from afar. In 2015, TV3 announced that two judges on New Zealand's version of The X Factor had been fired for bullying.

There's constructive criticism, and then there's whatever it was that husband-and-wife judges Natalia Kills and Willy Moon decided to do to 25-year-old contestant Joe Irvine. After his performance, Kills accused him (via The Guardian) of stealing her husband's look, then called him "disgusting," "artistically atrocious," and "creepy," adding "you make me sick." Moon got on board with the vitriol, going so far as to say he looked like "Norman Bates dressing up in his mother's clothing," and then going on to suggest the crowd — who was booing wholeheartedly by now — was in danger, because Irvine was the type to kill them.

They were fired shortly after, with the statement, "While the judges on X Factor are expected to provide critiques of the performances, we will not tolerate such destructive tirades from any of the judges."

Kills and Moon felt the outrage on social media, and both later apologized, saying (via Billboard) that "things got out of hand."

It's not entirely surprising that in June of 2020, The Wrap announced E! was going to be picking Kevin Hart's socially distanced game show, Celebrity Game Face. What is surprising is just how often Hart makes it clear how homophobic he is.

In 2016, he did an interview on the New York radio station Power 105.1 (via the Huffington Post), and he talked about turning down the role of a gay character in Tropic Thunder, because, he said, "What I think people are going to think while I'm trying to do this is going to stop me from playing that part the way I'm supposed to."

He also noted that he "appreciates and respects" the gay community. But it didn't seem that way in 2018, when he — as The Verge put it — "tweeted himself out of a job hosting the Oscars." The tweets absolutely aren't fit to repeat in polite company, but add in a stand-up special where he talked about his fear of having a gay son and his absolute refusal to apologize, and things got ugly. 

Hart hasn't stopped the hurtful comments. In 2019, NBC reported that he was at the center of another controversy when he shrugged off Lil Nas X for trying to have a serious conversation about the stigma gay people still face. Once again, Twitter made it clear that dismissive homophobia is not cool.

From 1945 to 1964, History says Queen for a Day gave audiences some entertainment that would be very, very uncomfortable today. Host Jack Bailey would interview a panel of four pre-selected women who each wanted something, and at the end, the winner was chosen by audience applause.

Here's where it gets creepy. Bailey was a former carnival barker, which gives an idea of his style. And the contestants on the show were poor, down-on-their-luck women who were asking for things they desperately needed — requests included a wheelchair for a disabled child, a crib that didn't keep falling apart, an artificial leg, a gurney so a polio-stricken child could get some fresh air, and encyclopedias for children's schoolwork. One woman appeared on the show after the accidental death of her husband, and she was hoping to get money to go back to school and support her family. Bailey's observation? "Poor little girl."

Timeline notes that Bailey was a master at getting the women to beg for what they needed, and if they started to cry, he'd berate them into stopping by telling them things like, "Quit shaking! What's wrong with you?"

Josh Shepperd of the Library of Congress' Radio Preservation Task Force sums up Bailey's performance — and the show — like this: "... clearly, the women are being humiliated."

In the 1940s and 50s, quiz shows were all the rage. The thing is, it was also pretty easy to cheat at them, as the host and producers of a show called Twenty-One discovered.

According to Closer Weekly, the show pitted two contestants against each other, and the first to answer questions right and get 21 points was the winner. The first episode was horrible — both contestants got 17 questions in a row completely wrong. The audience thought it was hilarious while their sponsor, Geritol, was absolutely livid. So, host/producer Jack Barry (pictured, center) and producer Dan Enright decided to cheat.

Contestants were coached not only in regards to the questions but also started being cast as characters. The biggest was Herbert Milton Stempel — the idea was to portray him as an unlikeable nerd. And then they brought in the handsome, charismatic, Columbia University professor Charles Van Doren (pictured, right) as the nerd-slayer. 

Barry and Enright got Stempel to throw the game so he could be replaced by Van Doren, promising him a spot on a new show they were developing. Van Doren took home $129,000 and appeared on the cover of Time and TV Guide, while Stempel went on to blackmail Enright. Eventually, the New York State District Attorney's office caught on, Twenty-One — and other rigged quiz shows — were busted, and that's pretty much why there are so many rules and regulations around game shows today.

Piers Morgan is a host on Good Morning Britain, Britain's Got Talent, and America's Got Talent, and he's widely regarded as one of the worst people on television. The Guardian described him, saying, "Piers Morgan, a man so ghastly that even America packaged him up and sent him back with a note saying: 'Keep him. He's yours.'" They followed that with words like "bullying and cartoonishly grotesque."

The offensive, terrible things he's said could fill a book, so here's a sampling (via the Huffington Post):

When someone tried to explain the idea of gender non-binary to him, he asked, "Can I be an elephant? Can I literally say I'm now an elephant, ... and demand to be put in an elephant compound because I have decided I'm an elephant?" He's accused those suffering from PTSD of instead having WNTS, or whiny needy twerp syndrome. He responded to the 2017 Women's March by saying he was going to start a Men's March, in order to "protest the creeping global emasculation of my gender by rabid feminists." When Kim Kardashian posted a photo showing her cellulite, he said, "Why should we celebrate it? We put up with it, tolerate it but not accept it. Flaws should not be celebrated." When fast food chain Greggs released a vegan steak bake, he accused them (via Evening Standard) of being "PC-ravaged clowns." (Greggs responded in a tweet, "Oh hello Piers, we've been expecting you.")

And yes, the list just keeps on going.

In 2011, the BBC announced that Stuart Hall — a regular on BBC Radio 5 and the original host of the sports quiz show A Question of Sport and It's a Knockout — was being awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his charity work and his services to broadcasting.

Two years later, The Guardian reported that the Crown Prosecution Service was now describing him as an "opportunistic predator" and one who had admitted to a string of offenses. It started with a trial alleging he had sexually assaulted a woman in 1976, and other instances of assault soon began to surface. The prosecutor later said that they were looking at the cases of 13 victims, between the ages of 9 and 17, and a series of assaults that had happened between 1968 and 1986. 

By 2014, The Guardian said that he had already been convicted of pedophilia but was cleared of 19 more incidents of sexual assault as more victims came forward. Hall pled guilty to several accounts of assault, and according to the BBC, two years and six months were added on to his original 15-month sentence. He was stripped of his OBE after he was jailed, and in 2015, he was released after serving about half of his sentence.

Netflix's Flinch is a game show where contestants have to resist doing exactly that — flinching, as terrifying things happen around them. Host Seann Walsh has had his share of horrible things popping up in his personal life, too.

It started when he was a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing, and he was caught smooching his then-married dance partner, Katya Jones. According to The Guardian, his girlfriend of five years, Rebecca Humphries, immediately ended their relationship, saying that she'd suspected for a while there was something going on — in spite of the fact he dismissed her "aggressively, and repeatedly, call[ing] me a psycho/nuts/mental. As he has done countless times throughout our relationship when I've questioned his inappropriate, hurtful behavior."

Actress Humphries continued, saying the incident reminded her she was "a strong, capable person who is now free; and no victim." She was lauded by domestic violence charities like Women's Aid (via the Irish Independent), who echoed the sentiment that psychological and emotional abuse is still abuse. 

Walsh, meanwhile, quit social media after he said his life was made an "absolute hell," says Digital Spy. That didn't last — in 2020, Extra says he was back in the spotlight in a video in which he appeared to grab girlfriend Grace Adderly by the throat and throw her onto the bed.

Ellen DeGeneres has had a long career being the sort of person you'd love to have for a friend, but in 2020, there were a huge number of people who started to come forward to say there was much more going on off-camera than viewers thought. It turns out, guests and staff alike have a major beef with the star of The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Ellen's Game of Games.

According to Entertainment Weekly, things really got started when comedian Kevin T. Porter tweeted in March 2020, "Right now we all need a little kindness. You know, like Ellen DeGeneres always talks about! She's also notoriously one of the meanest people alive. Respond to this with the most insane stories you've heard about Ellen being mean & I'll match every one w/$2 to @LAFoodBank."

Stories were awful. People came forward with how they had been instructed never to make eye contact with her and how she treated staff and guests alike on a good day — not to mention being left in the dark about how things were going to go through COVID. Staffers came forward with tales of a "toxic" work environment filled with threats, fear, sexual assault, harassments, and intimidation, with some saying they had been fired for things like taking off work to attend family funerals. DeGeneres issued several apologies, and Porter made a $600 donation to the food bank.

Jackie Gleason might be best known for The Honeymooners, but he also hosted a game show... very, very briefly. You're in the Picture was a show where contestants would stick their heads through a picture — carnival-style — and then have to ask questions to figure out where they were.

Don't remember it? That's not surprising. It was so bad that Mental Floss says after the first episode aired, Gleason took the next week's timeslot to issue a formal apology.

That was nice of him, but Gleason wasn't a nice guy. He may have been called "The Great One," but according to The New York Times, "Off screen, he was a sloth and a drunk, a bully and a boor, an unfaithful husband and an absentee father, a brutal boss and an abusive associate." 

Gleason — the child of two alcoholic parents — also struggled with alcoholism and regularly cheated on his wife of 40 years and the mother of his two daughters. He spent so little time with his daughters that Newsweek says when they called him on the phone, he rarely recognized their voices. He was so miserable to work with that he pushed Neil Simon out of television and into the theater, and one of his managers once wrote that he was "the worst person I ever worked with in my entire life, and it's not even close."

Donald Trump's alter-ego on the British version of The Apprentice is Lord Alan Sugar, and he's made some awful opinions well-known off-screen, starting with his 2020 tweets about facemasks.

In April 2020 he tweeted (via Sky) to his 5.3 million followers that if they were worried, they should make their own facemasks using rubber bands stapled to coffee filters. When followers pointed out that he was making a joke while health workers were facing a critical shortage of PPE, he responded, "Shut it."

In addition to believing small businesses shouldn't be given loans, he's also gotten in trouble for some racist comments directed toward Senegal's World Cup team. The Guardian says he apologized after tweeting a photo of the team and called them, "guys from the beach in Marbella. Multi tasking resourceful chaps." 

Then there's his opinions on female employees. In 2009, he was called out for judging female contestants on The Apprentice more harshly. The Guardian says that not only did he say women are more likely to be harder on women, but that he can't even imagine why on earth he would give a job to a woman who was pregnant. He's doubled down on that one, calling laws that prevent employers from asking job-seekers about their marital or child-bearing status "counterproductive." Instead, Sugar believes women looking for jobs should go to an interview ready to talk about not only the likelihood they might have children but their plans for childcare as well.

Nick Cannon is the host of MTV's Wild 'N Out and a presenter on The Masked Singer, and he's had a career that's spanned decades. In 2020, part of that career came to an end when he was fired from all ViacomCBS shows — which includes his MTV gig — for a podcast episode that "promoted hateful speech and spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories."

According to NPR, the podcast in question also featured Richard Griffin, also known as Professor Griff and the rapper who was kicked out of Public Enemy after a Washington Post interview in which he claimed Jews were behind "the majority of wickedness" in the world. During the podcast, Griffin claimed (via the BBC) that he was hated "because I told the truth," to which Cannon confirmed, "You're speaking facts."

Cannon went on to call him "a legend" and claim "Semitic people are black people," and added, "You can't be anti-Semitic when we are the Semitic people."

Cannon responded to his firing with (in part), "I demand full ownership of my billion dollar Wild 'N Out brand that I created, and ... I demand that the hate and back door bullying cease and while we are at it ... I demand the Apology!"

The Great British Bake Off might have a reputation as one of the warmest, fuzziest, most good-hearted competition shows out there, but not all of their hosts come from such a sweet background.

Matt Lucas — along with writing and performing partner David Walliams of Britain's Got Talent — was previously known for a show called Little Britain. The sketch show didn't just feature the occasional questionable sketch, it was filled with them. Glamour singles out characters like a Thai bride named Ting Tong, the "luxury obsessed obese black woman" named Desiree, and Daffyd, "a gay character seeped in homophobic stereotypes" as among the worst. But they weren't the only ones. Little Britain also ridiculed people with disabilities, the poor, and trans women, too.

In 2017, Lucas sort of apologized in The Guardian, saying he wouldn't play those characters anymore. (It's also worth noting that Little Britain came out in 2003.) He said that he would no longer perform in blackface, either, saying, "I wouldn't make that show now. It would upset people." 

And here's the thing — in 2010, Lucas and Walliams followed Little Britain with a show called Come Fly With Me, which once again featured the duo playing a group of questionable characters that included (via The Telegraph) a "lazy" West Indian woman (Lucas in blackface), a "deeply stupid" Pakistani worker, and a passenger liaison named Moses, which they note is Walliams not quite in blackface but instead "tanned up."