'This Morning' Cocks Up Stephen Hawking Tribute With 'All About That Bass'

Funny as TV cock-ups are, you always worry whether they've just cost someone their job. Well, someone might have been handed their P45 today after This Morning flopped at making a dignified tribute to legendary physicist Stephen Hawking - accidentally playing Meghan Trainor's 'All About That Bass' instead.

To close today's episode, the ITV breakfast programme looked to pay a last minute tribute to the legendary physicist who died today at the age of 76 - after ignoring his passing for the entire show.

However, instead of the sombre soundtrack or voiceover from the scientist himself you might expect in such a feature, they bizarrely played Meghan Trainor's hit over the top instead, leaving viewers perplexed.

To make matters worse, the inappropriately placed track kicked in with the line 'I got all the right junk in all the right places', before the show's technical team quickly pulled the plug and managed to play the right voiceover. Guessing this was a last-minute job, then.

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This Morning viewers quickly took to Twitter in disbelief, with one person even going so far as to call for a 'moment of silence' for the sound engineer who made the monumental cock-up.

A show insider later apologised for the error, calling it 'a technical blip' and saying that the decision to end with a tribute to Hawking had been the plan all along. Shame they made a total hash of it.

The insider told the Mirror: "Our last item is traditionally watched by most people, so it's a good slot and was deliberately planned that way. Plus doing the tribute at the end, means the programme fades out with that person's face or words on the screen and it's a moving way to end, giving them the final say.

"It was really unfortunate that there was a technical blip. It was corrected as soon as humanly possible. Sadly things like that can happen on live TV."

Thankfully Professor Hawking had a cracking sense of humour so he probably would have seen the funny side.

Topics: This Morning, Entertainment, TV and Film, UK Entertainment, Stephen Hawking

Chris Ogden

Chris Ogden is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from the University of East Anglia with degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing before completing his NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism. Chris has previously written for the independent culture magazine The Skinny, among other publications.

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