THE board of Channel 4 is to meet tomorrow to discuss whether Big Brother should be axed after the present series ends this week.

Several members of the board — chaired by Luke Johnson, the former head of Pizza Express — now believe last week’s allegations of racism by Jade Goody towards Shilpa Shetty have so discredited the show that it is doing immense harm to the channel and damaging race relations.

“Does this sort of programme still hold up today?” asked one senior board member about Big Brother this weekend. “Britain’s race relations are still pretty fragile, so we must be very careful.”

The current row adds to concerns about the show among the channel’s board members. They point to denigrating comments made on Big Brother last year towards Pete Bennett, a sufferer of Tourette syndrome. They have also questioned whether, without “manufactured rows”, the programme would be able to sustain itself.

This weekend’s comments are the first time since Big Brother began in 2000 that any member of the board — whose remit includes acting as custodian of the channel’s public service role — has publicly questioned whether it should be pulled.

The comments run counter to the publicly stated position of Channel 4, which — despite worldwide condemnation, including from much of the cabinet — continues to back the programme.

Tomorrow the board, whose members include Lord Puttnam, the film producer, Tony Hall, the former head of BBC News, the dotcom entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox, and Karren Brady, managing director of Birmingham City football club, will ask for a paper to be drafted quickly to explore what went wrong last week and to examine whether the programme should be ended.

“Is the franchise dying now?” asked another board member yesterday. “It certainly seems to be. Left to its own devices — that is, a so-called normal Big Brother without any manufactured row — it seems to be dying on its feet.

“Is it any longer legitimate to sustain the programme simply by turning up the volume to grab attention when the channel itself has no control over the outcome?” Before the racism controversy erupted last Tuesday and thousands of viewers complained, ratings for Celebrity Big Brother were disappointing. Viewing figures rose only after Goody and some other housemates ridiculed Shetty over her accent, her name, her food and her behaviour. On Friday, Goody was voted out of the house.

In an interview published today Goody admits her comments were racist but denied she is a racist. “I’m not going to justify my actions, because they were wrong. I was shocked to see how I behaved. I was shocked and disgusted at myself,” she said. “I don’t know why I said those things to her. Maybe I’m just really stupid and nasty at heart. But I really don’t think I am,” she told the News of the World in an interview for which she was not paid.

“I now know that things that I may not think are racist can actually be racist. It’s my own fault for not knowing enough about other people’s cultures.”

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