JIM Bowen last night admitted he was disappointed to leave Radio Lancashire after using a "racially offensive" phrase live on air.

Darwen audiences were shocked by the comedian's frankness and rewarded him with a unanimous round of applause for apologising about the mistake back in October last year on The Happy Daft Show.

At An Audience with Jim Bowen at the Darwen Library Theatre, he took the audience on a trip through his childhood, his early days on television and offered a chance for questions towards the end.

The 65-year-old, best known for darts gameshow Bullseye and his role in the Comedians in the 1970s, talked openly about his three-and-a-half year stint on the radio.

He said: "I had an excellent time there and I worked with some wonderful people.

"We were doing three hours a day, five days a week and it was all live. Given that amount of time there were times when little mistakes could've been passed by but the BBC were great throughout the whole thing. None of the listeners complained but we were inundated by internal calls from the BBC. It was just a case of me using a term that meant something different to me. I'd use it to mean someone who isn't the sharpest knife in the box, you know, the last to get picked for the football pitch, but others took it that I was being racist.

"I was simply using the vocabulary of my generation in 2003 and it wasn't good enough."