Comedian and author David Baddiel has apologised after he came under fire after clips emerged of him using a slur to refer to Gypsies in a tv show with longtime partner Frank Skinner.

In the clip from the Frank Skinner Show, originally broadcast in 2004, Mr. Baddiel recounts a time he visited a shop in Kensington dressed scruffily. He said: "The thing is that if you go into a shop like that, and you look like a bit of a pikey, which I sort of do when I’ve not got a suit on, and they don’t recognise you, they just think what the f**k are you doing in here, right?"

https://twitter.com/kwilliam111/status/1490277816830599168

Last week, when the now-viral clip of Jimmy Carr joking about the genocide of Roma people emerged, Baddiel slammed his "close friend" in a thread where he called Carr's joke "cruel and racist."

I said this every night during my Trolls: Not The Dolls tour as part of a bit arguing that it's not the subject matter of a joke that counts, it's the specifics of the individual joke. Clearly, Jimmy Carr's was the former. pic.twitter.com/xI4yWt9U0T

— David Baddiel (@Baddiel) February 5, 2022

Some online have made comparisons with Baddiel's condemnation of Carr and his own use of offensive language towards Travellers to accuse him of hypocrisy.

A spokesperson for David Baddiel said: “I’m sorry and I shouldn’t have used the term to refer to my own appearance. The internet often picks up on things that you did or said a long time ago that makes you look like a hypocrite because of things you said now, but the truth is we are all learning and changing all the time. My apologies again: sorry.”