The Bajd U Bejken controversy which kicked off last week when a seven-month podcast episode resurfaced on Facebook came to a head last night when the two hosts JD and Max went on TVM’s Popolin to address it… and some of their most vocal critics.“A lot of people who didn’t actually watch the whole thing in context are saying we stayed laughing about the fact that she killed him,” JD Patrick said, after explaining why he thought the whole controversy was an “orchestrated attack” because of how the clip was taken out of context and so late after its actual publication last year.The case at the heart of the whole controversy is the murder of Twannie Aquilina, an eight-year-old boy who was found partly beheaded in his home in Valletta in 1960. The gruesome case took over Maltese media for decades, especially considering the fact that the primary suspects included Twannie’s mother, Giga.“The joke was not made at Twannie, or his family, or whatever,” the podcast’s co-host Max continued. “The point of our show is comedy: we get something which is serious, in this case dark humour, and we make light of it. The serious thing is obviously the tragedy, which I didn’t even know about, and we made light of it by exaggerating the plot.”“Obviously, no one is going to go and murder a kid for no reason, but there’s that little bit of a joke that everyone knows, a social norm, that young kids tend to be a bit naughty,” Max expanded. “And we took that to the full extreme by mentioning a serious case. We hurt people, or sorry, people got hurt, because it hit home.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lovin Malta (@lovinmalta)Max went on to mention a number of different tragic cases for around the world, including the death of countless Palestinian kids, 9/11 victims, last summer’s Titan tragedy and later even the Holocaust and jokes about killing illegal immigrants, and how no one seems to bat an eye when those things happened. “But for us, it hit home because it’s local,” Max explained. “We are a local programme, so we will talk about Maltese pop culture. And that’s why we’re doing well.”Throughout the show, however, things got heated multiple times, with a number of critics on the panel from across the Maltese entertainment industry calling the pair out, even implying that Bajd U Bejken’s audience are “so sad” that they need vulgarity to be entertained.What do you make of the podcast hosts’ explanation of the controversy?•