Whoops! Live anchor caught flipping the bird

Host Maryam Moshiri hardly skipped a beat after realising her mistake, saying "Live from London, this is BBC News" before introducing a segment on Boris Johnson's appearance at a coronavirus inquiry.

The slip was broadcast globally on the BBC News world feed during Prime Minister's Questions on December 6.

Ms Moshiri explained in a social post "she was pretending to count down as the director was counting me down from 10-0.. including the fingers to show the number. So from 10 fingers held up to one.

"When we got to 1 I turned finger around as a joke and did not realise that this would be caught on camera."

It's not the first time Ms Moshiri made headlines of her own since becoming a chief news presenter at the BBC in 2019.

She was reporting on September's rare blue supermoon when the scheduled footage of the lunar event failed to air and Ms Moshiri was forced to improvise.

"I'm so sorry, I don't have a picture to show you," she said while holding her hands in a circle to replace the missing graphics.