What was supposed to be a serious reporting turned out to be a trippy segment. Reporter Quentin Sommerville released a clip of himself accidentally getting high on a cocktail of burning drugs while trying to report on the news.

Sommerville is a Middle East Correspondent for the BBC who has reported on major issues such as the Islamic State crisis in the area since 2012. There was a time several years ago, though, when reporting on a serious matter was a struggle for him.

“Deer tweeps, it’s been a year of bullets & bloodshed. You’ve earned a xmas laugh, at my expense,” the news correspondent wrote to his Twitter followers on Monday, including a YouTube video of him attempting unsuccessfully to deliver the news.

The clip he titled “Don’t Inhale” sees him striving to finish his script in front of a burning pile of drugs. It was a mountain of a task even for a veteran newsman like him, however, when he got to inhale the smoke from the pile.

“Burning behind me is eight and a half tonnes of heroin, opium, hashish and other narcotics,” he started to say in the video before collapsing into fits of giggles. He started again, but he wasn’t even able to get a few words out.

“Quick, quick, we just need one more,” he told his cameraman, but his mind appeared to remain blank. He and his cameraman then burst into laughter together.

The video and Sommerville’s tweet have now been deleted, probably due to copyright issues. However, copies of the said clip still appear on YouTube.

“The video of Quentin corpsing, which has now been deleted, was posted in the spirit of a blooper,” a BBC spokesman told the Telegraph. “It was filmed four years ago – it hasn’t been seen before and was never broadcast.”