Britannia Radio

October 27, 2008

The Boorish Broadcasting Corporation

Daily Mail 27 October 2008

Hardened as we all undoubtedly are to the offensive garbage that now masquerades as broadcast entertainment, you still have to pinch yourself.

On a BBC Radio 2 show recently, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand aired a series of obscene phone calls they had made to the 78-year-old Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs.

Shortly before they contacted him for a pre-arranged telephone interview, Brand said: ‘The elephant in the room is, what Andrew doesn’t know is, I’ve slept with his granddaughter.’

When the actor didn’t answer his phone, Brand left a message during which Ross shouted ‘He ****** your granddaughter!’, producing raucous laughter from the studio.

Ross subsequently speculated that Brand had ‘enjoyed’ the 23-year-old granddaughter on a swing. In three further messages Brand amplified his disgusting claim, while Ross could be heard singing quietly to himself: ‘Your granddaughter… she was bent over the couch… ‘

Later in the programme Brand even fantasised in a joke news bulletin that the actor (who played the Spanish waiter in Fawlty Towers) might hang himself as a result of their comments.

What kind of degraded cultural universe are we all now living in? What possible justification can there be for this vile behaviour, let alone putting it on air? How can the gratuitous harassment of an elderly man by foul obscenities about his granddaughter be considered public entertainment?

If an ordinary person were to find such messages on their telephone voicemail, they would immediately call the police. Anyone found guilty of making malicious or abusive phone calls can be fined or sentenced to up to six months in prison.

Yet on this occasion, such calls were made from the studios of the BBC, and then the victim of this assault was humiliated in public by the calls being broadcast on a BBC show. And all at public expense.

The issue here is not just the use of profanities, but the cruelty and indeed sadism in the desire to torment an unsuspecting elderly man and his family.

This is so far beyond the pale that one has to ask whether it was fuelled by either alcohol or drugs. If not, it suggests behaviour bordering on the psychopathic in its total absence of awareness of the effect upon another person of such abuse.

The show was not live but pre-recorded. According to the BBC, ‘a senior editorial figure signed off the programme, including its strong language, before it was broadcast’.

So no one in authority at the BBC thought there was anything wrong in this? Not the show’s producer. Not its editor. Nor Radio 2’s Head of Live Music, Events and Talent, the station’s Controller or any of the BBC’s army of policy, taste or standards commissars?

Not one of these executives pulled this item, nor — at least until news of this event appeared yesterday in the Mail on Sunday — took any kind of disciplinary action against Ross or Brand.

How could it be otherwise? This is, after all, what the BBC pays these men a huge chunk of the licence fee for. Ross is paid £6 million a year for his TV chat show, Radio 2 show and film review programme.

Two years ago, he caused a storm by asking Conservative leader David Cameron if he had ever had teenage sexual fantasies about former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ‘in stockings’ and then referring to a lewd act.

Brand, who is thought to be paid a six-figure sum for his weekly radio show, made a prank call to Northamptonshire Police last year claiming he had spotted a sex attacker. And in 2006, he boasted at an awards ceremony that he had slept with Rod Stewart’s daughter Kimberly.

The terrible thing is that it is precisely this kind of behaviour which makes these performers so attractive to the BBC. The more offensive they are, the higher their value.

In the Sony awards earlier this year, Ross was judged the top personality on UK music radio, while Brand had the best entertainment show.

Television reviewers fawn over Brand for his Left-wing prejudices and ‘bad boy’ background. Audiences split their sides over Ross’s sniggering lavatorial humour, of the kind that is commonly found in the school playground.

This is part of a more general phenomenon. It’s becoming almost impossible to switch on the TV without being assailed by a barrage of expletives and obscenities, particularly — for some unexplained reason — when it comes to cooking programmes.

It is an absolute mystery why this is thought to be funny — all it does is advertise the performer’s inarticulacy.

A couple of weeks ago Channel 4 broadcast The Secret Policeman’s Ball with a line-up of Britain’s supposedly top comic talent. Please avert your eyes if you are of a sensitive disposition, but Frank Skinner talked about peeing and having sex ‘doggy style’, Jonathan Ross discussed his long testicles, Alan Carr went on about Botox and blowjobs, and Russell Howard told a story about his brother’s erection during an epileptic fit.

For more than 40 years, ever since the critic Kenneth Tynan uttered the F-word on TV, we have been subjected to this arrested adolescence and pathetic desire to shock. Isn’t it about time that society finally grew up?

Worse still is the way such vulgarity and absence of talent go hand in hand with a culture of cruelty. The omnipresent reality TV shows are designed to make people look stupid or powerless and induce in the audience a gloating voyeurism.

On the worst, such as Channel 5’s Unbreakable, the contestants are subjected to torture. The least offensive of them, such as The Apprentice or The Restaurant, draw their appeal from the anticipation of someone getting a tongue-lashing or being fired.

Watching other people show distress, incompetence or mediocrity and then seeing them humiliated for exhibiting these characteristics apparently entertains audiences by making them feel superior.

What kind of society have we become in which enough people gain vicarious pleasure or entertainment from such displays to persuade cynical and unprincipled TV executives they can make huge profits from them?

Long, long ago the BBC was a noble institution, supposed to have a mission to inform, educate and entertain. Now its mission appears to be to degrade, coarsen and brutalise.

As we all know, however, the only justification for the licence fee is that the BBC should perform a unique broadcasting service in the public interest. BBC executives often claim that the quality of radio alone justifies the licence fee. Well, after the Andrew Sachs episode, not any more.

If the BBC were fit for purpose, Brand and Ross would be sacked, along with the executives who passed their horrible stunt as fit for broadcast. But, of course, that won’t happen.

On the offending show’s website, there is a video teaser featuring Brand and Ross fooling around, in the middle of which they make what purports to be an apology.

We didn’t mean to be insensitive to Andrew Sachs, they grin, it was just a joke; ‘we didn’t realise that what we do here has a reality outside’.

Then Brand sings an ‘apology’ song, which nevertheless again repeats the original granddaughter claim — which Ross then turns into yet another joke about ‘trivialising’ their offence.

If the BBC thinks this is an adequate response, then it really has lost the plot.

The public should now take matters into its own hands. Don’t listen to Russell Brand or watch Jonathan Ross. Just switch them off. It’s the only language the Boorish Broadcasting Corporation will understand.