Channel 4 boss says Jordan Gray sketch was a 'beautiful moment of trans expression'

Channel 4 chief executive Alex Mahon has defended Jordan Gray's controversial performance on the Friday Night Live revival earlier this year.

Comedian Gray performed her comic song Better Than You, which is a satirical account of her experience of a trans woman, as part of Channel 4's 40th anniversary celebration.

As part of the performance Gray stripped down completely naked and as a result more than a thousand people complained to Ofcom.

Mahon defended the performance at the broadcaster's Inclusion Festival: "She’s trans and she stripped naked at the end of the performance and that was the first time, I think, really on mainstream television you see a trans body and what that looks like. That’s really important, it was a beautiful moment of trans expression. It was lovely."

Read more: Jordan Gray on that Channel 4 moment

She added: “What’s great is a couple of thousand people complained to Ofcom, and Ofcom back us and say it’s perfectly, perfectly appropriate to put that on television.

"What’s even more powerful is young people writing to Jordan and talking about how that made them feel better about themselves, and better about what they are going through."

Talking to Huffpost in November, Gray said: “I like being the friendly face of transgenderism for people who don’t know what they’re looking at or what the subject entails. I like being sort of a beacon.”

Mahon also stressed the importance of normalising our bodies: “This is a really difficult time for young people, and that kind of thing, the normalising of different body types is really, really important. So all the time, we’re looking for what the next frontier is, and that’s a good struggle for us to be going through to think about.”

Regarding the complaints, Ofcom said: “In our view, audiences would be likely to have expected controversial humour from this one-off special reviving an established alternative comedy series.

"We also took into account the time of the broadcast, which came more than an hour after the watershed, and the advance on-air warnings about very strong language and adult humour.”

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