ITV has been cleared of racism by TV watchdog Ofcom after Sir Trevor McDonald called the late controversial comic Bernard Manning a "fat, white bastard".

A total of 112 viewers complained that the remark, made on Sir Trevor's ITV1 Sunday night news comedy programme News Knight the week Manning died, was inappropriate or racist.

But Ofcom said Sir Trevor "clearly intended to parody" Manning's own brand of comedy, which played on racial stereotypes and was often denounced as racist.

The regulator cleared ITV of breaching broadcasting guidelines, ruling that "any offence that may have been caused was justified by the context".

During the June 24 edition of News Knight, less than a week after Manning's death aged 76, Sir Trevor introduced an item as "Racist and Dead".

"This week, it's the turn of corpulent, narrow-minded northerner Bernard Manning," he said. "Personally, I never thought of Bernard Manning as a racist comic... just a fat, white bastard...".

In its ruling, Ofcom pointed out that News Knight was broadcast at 10pm, a full hour after the 9pm watershed and that it was clearly "an edgy, satirical look at the week's news".

"In the case of this programme, Sir Trevor McDonald obviously, and intentionally, drew on Bernard Manning's own style of humour, which frequently played on the real or apparent prejudices of his audience.

"The comments were clearly intended to parody Manning's own comedy, where he claimed he was not himself racist, but simply made 'jokes' based on racial stereotypes," Ofcom said.

"It was in such a context that Sir Trevor McDonald could therefore state that he did not consider Manning to be a racist but then went on to say that he was '...a fat white bastard'".