Private British broadcaster Channel 4 has scrapped Celebrity Big Brother from its 2008 schedule after this year's show led to accusations of racial taunting.

Celebrity Big Brother has been one of its most popular shows and this year's series had record ratings after contestant Shilpa Shetty became the centre of a race row.

Demonstrators hold portraits of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty as they protest British reality show Celebrity Big Brother in January.
(Prakash Hatvalne/Associated Press)

The Bollywood actress went on to win the contest after an incident in which she was taunted by other contestants.

Channel 4 was forced to apologize for the incident after thousands of complaints from viewers and protests by hundreds of people in India.

Now the channel has performed a major revamp of its 2008 lineup, cutting other reality TV series such as You Are What You Eat and Brat Camp from its prime-time schedule.

"These are the decisions of a public service broadcaster in search of the new and the exciting," Channel 4's head of programs Julian Bellamy said.

"If we wanted to take the easy path we'd recommission all of these shows and we'd probably do two series of Celebrity Big Brother if ratings were all we were after," he said, adding that the station wants to clear the decks for new shows.

Earlier this year, the channel cut most of its phone-in competitions after an internal inquiry found problems dating back to 2004.

And it has announced it will spend about £10 million ($21 million Cdn.) less on U.S. programming this year than last year.

The controversial Big Brother program, a franchise from Netherlands-based Endemol, is shown in countries around the world.

Channel 4 said it has not decided to cut the program completely and will make a decision about whether it should appear on its 2009 schedule at a later date.