Tyson Fury: If you don't like how I speak, change the channel

The world heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury has told ITV news he won't change when it comes to making controversial comments.

The only thing he's going to change, he says, is his weight. "I've got to lose six stone".

He's getting into shape again because he's due to have a rematch with Vladimir Klitschko, the man he beat to win the world titles back in November.

The rematch is due to take place at the MEN arena in Manchester in 13 weeks time, on 9 July .

Fury told me "I'm very unfit at the moment. 24 stone. So I've go to get down to about 18 stone, 18 stone 5".

Fury famously found himself in hot water before the original fight, after expounding his views on homosexuality and paedophilia.

But when I asked him if he now had to bite his tongue before he spoke, he looked at me incredulously and replied: "Does it look like it ? Does it sound like it? I wouldn't have thought so.

"No one can stop me speaking how I speak. If you don't like it, change the channel, don't read about it. End of ."

It's true. In his press conference he talked about "slapping bit****" and "drinking and sha**ing".

Fury says his life hasn't changed one bit since he became the champion.

But he then added, tellingly, "I've had a bit more racial abuse and a bit more discrimination against me, but that's about it really. Fame equals jealousy and hatred."

But despite an apparently indifferent attitude to this subject, within the Fury family it does seem to be a something of an exposed nerve. There's always a sense that he's not given the credit or the respect his achievements and his personal life deserve.

Fury is from a travelling background. And during today's press conference, his father John, launched into a ten minute tirade against the assembled journalists and, well everyone, saying his son is always judged and how the press never ask him proper questions.

"It's like a game of ping pong.

"We're real men, we fight for pride , I've done twelve years for a fight (John Fury was sent to prison for gouging out a man's eye in a brawl). We've 300 years of bloodline.

"That's what we're fighting for. We're discriminated against. It's racism. It's racism. If he (Tyson) was out of the Peckham estate he'd be having tea with the queen and taken on an open topped bus."

This last line received a round of applause and laughter.

It, however, had a serious undertone. That was a thinly veiled jibe, or jab, at British heavyweights Anthony Joshua, who became a world champion himself on Saturday night, and David Haye.

When I asked Tyson Fury whether he shared his father's views, he said: "It must be an important issue to me dad, but to me it's not. I don't care about respect. Respect: yada yada yada so what."

And as for Joshua, Tyson Fury is taking it one fight at a time, but you sense he has little respect for him "He's just a body builder", he said. End of.