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15th Mar 2017

The family behind THAT viral BBC interview have issued a statement to answer some of the public’s questions

Conor Heneghan

BBC Interview

“Yes, I was wearing pants.”

Nearly a week since the interview went viral in a big way last week, people are still talking about the interview given by Professor Robert E. Kelly on the BBC last week.

We’d be amazed if you haven’t seen it by now, but on the off chance you haven’t, Kelly was being interviewed about South Korea live on the BBC when his kids came through the door behind him in hilarious fashion before his wife intervened in an effort to let Kelly focus on the job at hand.

Amazed by the scale of the reaction to the video worldwide and unsure how exactly to respond, Kelly and his family subsequently appeared in a follow-up interview with the BBC and the Wall Street Journal and held a press conference in Korea in an attempt to explain a few things.

As well as that, the Kelly family issued a statement on Wednesday to clear up some of the questions raised in the aftermath of it going global, explanations for which, offered by Professor Kelly, you can see below:

Our favourite is his clarification that he was, in fact, wearing pants.

  • Yes, the woman in the video is my wife, Jung-A Kim/김정아, not my nanny.
  • The first child to enter is our daughter, Marion Yena Kelly/켈리 매리언 예나, age 4.
  • The second is our son, James Yousup Kelly/켈리 제임스 유섭, age 9 months.
  • No, Jung-A did not use too much force in removing the children from the room. It is quite apparent from the video that she is frantically trying to salvage the professionalism of the interview. The children were not injured. When Marion speaks in the clip, she says, in Korean, ‘why Mom?’ She is responding in surprise, because we normally do not treat out children this way. Marion’s willingness to comfortably traipse into my home office illustrates her usual ease with her parents.
  • No, I was not shoving Marion out of the way. I was trying to slide her behind my chair where there are children’s toys and books, in hopes she would play with them for a few moments until the interview ended.
  • Yes, I was wearing pants. I choose not to stand, because I was trying to salvage the interview.
  • No, this was not staged.
  • Yes, the flat surface to my left was in fact a covered-up air-mattress. Our children like to play and jump on it.
  • No, the map was not hung there as a prop. It was a gift and genuinely helps me learn world place names in Korean.
  • No, we did not fight about the blooper afterward, nor punish our children. Rather, we were mortified. We assumed that no television network would ever call me again to speak.
  • We have no comment on the many social analyses of the video. We see this simply as a very public family blooper, nothing more.

Sounds like a fairly thorough explanation to us; you can read the statement in full here.

Topics:

Viral,World News