Following the radio survey break last week, Kyle made his return to The Kyle and Jackie O Show on Monday and issued a grovelling apology.
“Am I going to quit? No. Am I going to get fired? No. Am I sorry? Absolutely I am sorry,” he said. “I never intended to purposely upset anyone. Obviously, I have upset people and I am sorry for it. There’s nothing else I can do but to say, hey, I am sorry for that.”
Kyle claimed that someone published his mobile phone number online after his Virgin Mary comments and he received hundreds of angry calls.
“Some were very, very aggressive, a lot of people hung up … there were threats,” he said. “But the main thing I took out of it was, you know me, I believe everyone has the right to their own opinion and their own religious beliefs and no one has the right to take that away from them. But what I didn’t realise until I started taking these calls was that I’d stepped on the belief of other people and that’s what I’d done wrong.
“It was a joke and it was a hugely bad decision, poor taste. I didn’t plan that joke … I was just spit-balling live here. I didn’t realise the gravity of it and it really upset a lot of people. Even friends of mine were like, ‘Bro, how could you say something so dumb like that?’
“I get upset at the fact that I’ve caused a lot of grief to a lot of people. That’s never what I meant to do. I was just trying to make people have a laugh and I didn’t realise I was trodding (sic) quite heavily on very gentle territory for a lot of people.”