6 June 2014



The video, at first welcomed as a frivolous piece of fun, is now nothing more than a

testament of the abuse of a disabled man.

Several young technicians at Oxford University have been expelled after it was revealed that they had tampered with Professor Stephen Hawking's voicebox, forcing him to make a foul-mouthed presentation about football.

The video, which was posted online last week, soon went viral, as internet users took delight in seeing the physics professor apparently make jokes about Luis Suárez being "a ballerina" and saying that "England couldn't hit a cow's arse with a banjo" in a penalty shootout.

The innocent fun soon turned sour, however, when it was revealed that Hawking had no control over what he was saying.

"He's not like he seems in the sitcoms," said avid Hawking-watcher, Joanna Corey. "He can't take part in spontaneous conversations - he controls a kind of keyboard via his eye movements. It's a very pain-staking process that has got harder and harder for him to operate as his condition has deteriorated. It would have taken him about 45 minutes to select the accented a in Suárez - it's pretty obvious he wouldn't have spent the best part of a day making a puerile three-minute presentation."

The suspended students have not yet been named, but now it appears that the latest scandal follows several months of local rumours of abuse of the professor. Unconfirmed reports suggest the youngsters have been seen putting the professor into compromising sexual positions with animals and statues in his garden, or have simply turned off his machine so he cannot call for help and left him outside in the rain.

"In the video itself," Corey adds, "You can see they placed a silly scarf around his neck. This might just be the tip of the iceberg. I've heard that once they dressed him up like Panthro and glued cardboard cutouts to his wheelchair to make it look like the Thunder Tank.

"I just pray to God that that video never comes to light."