The BBC has purged mentions of disgraced stars Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris along with a number of racist and misogynistic jokes used in several of its classic radio comedies.

An anonymous Radio 4 Extra listener discovered the BBC had been quietly editing repeats of shows over the past few years to be more in keeping with social mores, the Times reported.

Labelling them as “woke cuts,” the listener found edits had been made to old episodes of Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son and I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again.

In some cases entire sketches had been removed.

For example, a repeat of a 1970 episode of I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, starring John Cleese and Bill Oddie, had a joke about a scantily clad woman removed.

In the original broadcast, Cleese, impersonating a BBC spokesman, said: “We have noticed that it is possible to see right up to the girls’ knickers, owing to the shortness of their miniskirts, so we’ve asked the girls to drop them.”

The BBC also stripped a mention of the n-word from a 1972 episode of the Ronnie Barker sketch show Lines From My Grandfather’s Forehead.

A reference to African people being “cannibals” was also removed from a 1950 episode of Much Binding in the Marsh, a comedy set in a RAF station.

In a sketch from 1970, David Hatch adopted an Indian accent and was described as being “browned off”. The skit was removed.

Other deleted sketches included a spoof of Harris’s songs, titled Rolf Harris’s Dirty Songbook.

A spokesman for the BBC said: “Listeners enjoy a huge number of old comedies from the archives on 4 Extra and on occasion we edit some episodes so they’re suitable for broadcast today, including removing racially offensive language and stereotypes from decades ago, as the vast majority of our audience would expect.”