EXPERTS have issued new guidelines for live TV gaffe recovery after Tomasz Schafernaker almost took his eye out with an emergency middle finger retraction.
BBC News 24 footage shows the weatherman making a dirty finger gesture before realising he was on screen and attempting to distract the viewers’ attention by attacking himself in the face.
But Julian Cook, from the Royal College of Opthamologists, said Schafernaker seems to have made the ‘classic mistake’ of pretending to scratch his cheek but had instead come within millimetres of either blinding himself or taking his own nose off.
He added: “In those circumstances, time is simply not on your side and if you react too quickly there will be uncontrolled fingers all over the place.
“The best thing is to simply leave the dirty finger where it is.
“It may look like an unfathomable act of rudeness and defiance on the part someone who is simply there to do the weather, but what you are actually witnessing is health and safety best practice.
“Of course you could also extend all the fingers on your hand so it looks like you’re either examining your palm for stains or are counting down to ‘weather time’.
“And if you are going to be working with a particularly smart arse newsreader do remember to wear safety goggles or better still, a welder’s mask.”
The existing guidelines were introduced after BBC sports presenter Rob Bonnet was caught making an aggressive masturbation gesture at Philip Hayton before trying to cover it up by pretending to choke and then punching himself in the stomach in what he later insisted was a ‘sort of DIY Heimlich manoeuvre’.
