Listen again: BBC censors Auden quip

The digital age has provided endless opportunities for manipulating the truth - the camera can now truly been made to lie. Perhaps egged on by this, it seems the BBC have decided to exploit the technology that allows an even greater deception, the ability to put words into peoples' mouths.

Sebastian Faulks (pictured), author of a number of bestselling novels among them Birdsong and Engleby, revealed in yesterday's Observer newspaper that on a recent appearance on the Radio 4 quiz show The Wright Stuff, on which he serves as a team captain, he was asked a question that related to WH Auden, who was, of course, famously and unrepentantly homosexual.

Said Faulks: "In an early odd-one-out round, we were given four cryptic references to books or poems, including WH Auden's Lullaby. As I mused out loud on the scribbles on my notepad, I said: 'Right, James. Starting at the bottom, as indeed Auden so often did...". The remark got a laugh from the audience.

But when Faulks went online to the BBC's Listen Again service, which allows people who have missed the show to hear it at their leisure, he was surprised to find the joke had be excised. "On Listen Again, this came out as, 'Starting with the fourth...'," he says. "The odd thing is that we didn't do a retake at the time. They synthesised my voice in the edit to say 'the fourth'. Scary or what?"

In this case, it is not the doctoring of photographs – removing commisars who'd fallen out of favour - but the doctoring of comments which are deemed by the Beeb to be politically incorrect.