BRIT Awards viewers were left horrified after Robbie Williams’ famous chimp appeared to ‘snort drugs’ live on air during a chaotic skit.
The unexpected moment came as part of a comedy segment featuring the primate from Better Man, the Angels singer's biopic.
Host Jack Whitehall, 36, had poked fun at Robbie's previous struggles with drug and alcohol addiction as he introduced Myles Smith's performance.
The comedian made a series of quips about the hitmaker sending his mascot to events he didn’t want to attend, with a man in the chimp costume emulating drinking bottles of Champagne and taking drugs.
He said: "Oh no, sorry, that's the monkey from Better Man. I had heard Robbie has been sending the monkey to quite a lot of events he can't be a***d with.
"Last week it did Loose Women, Jonathan Wilkes' birthday and date night with Ayda [Field]. I've also heard, unfortunately, that monkey has gone off the rails a bit since it got famous."
The scene escalated as he continued: "It was chucked off the ITV2 show earlier for snorting a line of PG Tips and chimping Ella Henderson.
"And I don’t even want to talk about the videos I saw of it on that night out with David Coote," he added of the referee's cocaine scandal.
Fans were quick to react on social media, with many in disbelief over what they had just witnessed.
One user wrote: "The f*****g monkey doing a line," along with a skull emoji.
Someone else added: "The Robbie Williams Better Man monkey just did a line of coke off one of the tables at the #BRITs i-."
A third said: "No way did they just have that monkey racking a line up."
Robbie previously revealed why he's played by a chimp in the film, telling the BBC: "Quite often, Rob will say, 'I'm just like a performing monkey,' or, 'I'm up the back like a performing monkey.'
"It just sparked this idea of, we've got this chance to tell this story, not from the perspective of how we see Rob, but how he sees himself."
Having initially planned to play the monkey himself, Robbie explained why he changed his mind.
He said: "I was going to, but it involved me leaving my family for loads and loads of months. And the thought of that was just too much for me to bear."
Robbie has long been open about his addiction battles.
The Take That star previously told The Sun he was so high on drugs the first evening he spent with future wife Ayda at a party he was in a Jacuzzi “clucking like a chicken”.
But instead of heading for the hills, she moved in with him for three weeks to nurse him.
Robbie told the story in his 2017 book, Reveal.
The musical icon also talked about his issues with anxiety, weight, stage fright and addiction.
The book details how, at different times, he was taking morphine, Adderall (used to treat narcolepsy and ADHD), Vicodin (pain killer) speed, Seroquel (used for treating schizophrenia) and cocaine combined, magic mushrooms and “a few more things”.
He turned to drugs and “sat on a sofa, ate potato chips and chocolate, got fat and grew a beard”.
A friend thought it would be a good idea for Robbie to hook up with mutual friend and actress Ayda Field, now a presenter on Loose Women.
Author Chris Heath, who also collaborated with Robbie in 2004 on previous book Feel, wrote: “What the friend had told Rob, words that would mess with his head for a long time, was, ‘I’ve got a friend for you, she’s f***ing crazy but she might be fun for an evening’.”
Robbie recalled: “I googled her, she was obviously very attractive. But I was also doing a lot of pills that were making me antisocial. So we had plans but I flaked.
“I left her a message days, weeks, later, and it made her laugh. We made plans to meet. But I wasn’t leaving my house, so she had to meet me there, which freaked her out a bit.”
On his preparation for the date, Robbie said: “A dealer had come round that I was sleeping with and she’d given me all these pills. So I’d slept with the dealer, taken a bunch of pills.”
Ayda, who had been at a party, was dropped off at Rob’s house. Robbie recalled: “Porsche door opens and out of the back seat clambers this girl. She’s wearing a dress with pockets and it makes her look frumpy, and my first thought was, ‘Oh, she’s put on a lot of weight’.
“In she came, and she’s had a few red wines. I don’t think the situation suited her, being at a stranger’s house, coming from a party.”
Robbie decided to escort her back to the party. He said: “It’s a tech party with tech people. It was like Revenge of the Nerds.
“So I got tucked into a lot of drugs. Anyway, I took a turn for the worse, because I started to cluck like a chicken.
“There was a moment in the Jacuzzi where Ayda had gone and got changed and she came in wearing this Ursula Andress bikini, and she had a killer body.
“So I was in the Jacuzzi with a very, very hot girl in Hollywood doing a Hollywood thing. But then I got ill, started to cluck, had to leave, embarrassingly.”
Ayda went with him — and stayed at his side for three weeks.
They married in 2010 and have become inseparable, with two kids — daughter Theodora “Teddy” Rose and son Charlton “Charlie” Valentine.
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