14 DAY TRIAL // With all the outrage he caused last year as host of the Golden Globes, Ricky Gervais will be back to give it another go. However, this time, producers are taking all precautions to ensure he no longer offends A-listers in attendance.
The British comedian will host this Sunday's Golden Globes 2012 ceremony, his third stint in as many years.
While his monologues in the previous year got many fans riled up against him – and celebrities reportedly so upset they started pretending not to know him – ratings for that one show were very high.
In other words, controversy paid off one more time and Gervais, maligned as he was, was the star of the show.
Even with this in mind, NBC bosses want to make sure he doesn't step over the line again, the Daily Mail informs.
As such, they're instating a 7-second delay to the live transmission, to protect the celebrities he might target from public ridicule.
“I’m told executives at the major broadcaster NBC, which will screen the awards live for five hours in primetime, have insisted on a ‘seven-second delay’,” the Mail writes.
“The delay lets Dick Clark, the award show’s legendary 83-year-old producer, cut comments about celebs in attendance that are deemed too close-to-the-bone to broadcast,” says the tab.
Had the 7-sec rule been in place at the Globes 2011, stars like Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, Hugh Hefner and Robert Downey Jr. might have been spared the pain of knowing millions of people from all over the world laughed at them.
“NBC loves Ricky because he increased the ratings, but they know he wants to create headlines again and they can’t take the risk of broadcasting something inappropriate,” says the insider.
However, this comes to contradict what Gervais himself has been saying ever since he was asked to host again.
With the official announcement, he also issued a statement to say (read: promise) he'd include more digs at celebrities and humor that would be truly spot-on, as opposed to last year.
“The outrage I caused was of course, as usual, totally out of proportion to the things I said. I don't think anyone had any right to be offended but they were. This year I'm going to make sure their offense is completely justified,” Gervais wrote on his official blog.