Video: Classic news gaffes

The normally austere tones of the 8 o'clock news on BBC Radio 4's Today programme were replaced by fits of hilarity this morning when a newsreader was unable to stop laughing after hearing a clip of an old sound recording.

Charlotte Green had just finished reading an item about what appeared to be the earliest recording of the human voice, made in 1860, when she fell into an uncontrollable fit of laughter from which she was unable to recover.

Ms Green's latest "corpsing" episode was immediately reported on the BBC sister station Radio 5 Live and prompted thousands of calls to the BBC press office and instant replays on websites.

The giggles were triggered by a recording of the French song Au Clair De La Lune, unearthed by American scientists, that was apparently made 11 years before Thomas Edison first demonstrated the gramophone. The strange, scarcely audible, wail was too much for Ms Green, who was unable to recover her composure and broke down intermittently during the next item: a report on the death of the esteemed screenwriter Abby Mann.

After an initial chuckle for which she apologised, Ms Green embarked on the story about Mann, who won the Oscar for best screenplay in 1961, but began laughing again almost immediately, apparently prompted by someone else in the studio. By the time she was recounting the fact that Mann had won several awards for his work, which included the script for the film Judgment at Nuremberg, she was laughing loudly, and soon after she had to stop completely, leaving an awkward silence. She was finally rescued by James Naughtie, the Today presenter, who launched into a report about Iraq.

The BBC said that Ms Green's giggles started when she heard in her earpiece a colleague's remark that the clip sounded like "a bee buzzing in a bottle". A spokeswoman said that the programme had so far had 20 comments about the incident, "all positive, about how funny they found it" and no complaints.

Ms Green has been a Radio 4 newsreader for about ten years, and has also presented News Speak, for the World Service, as well as been a narrator on BBC Two. She has also been a judge for the BBC Frank Gillard Annual Local Radio Awards, and in 2002 won the Radio Times award for the Most Attractive Female Voice on the Radio. She has form in this area however, having “corpsed” in 1997 while delivering a Today programme item about Papua New Guinea’s chief of staff Jack Tuat. But Ms Green was unrepentant. Recalling the incident in a recent interview, she said: “It’s an open secret that I have a ribald sense of humour. I knew immediately that I was going to have trouble getting through the next story, which to compound the problem was about a sperm whale. For me, it’s essential to laugh both at the absurdity of life and at oneself. Inevitably, the laughter sometimes spills over into my work and I find myself poleaxed by merriment.”

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