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Saturday 4 July 2009

BrandRossGate

Piers Morgan seems to me to be spot on in his judgement: 

Russell Brand...is almost an irrelevance in this.

He's just a sex-obsessed ex-junkie, a pre-Raphaelite version of Bernard Manning who will say literally anything to make a cheap tabloid headline, however lewd, crude or downright disgusting. I wouldn't expect anything else from him.

But Jonathan Ross is different. He is the highest-paid star in BBC history, their flagship hero, a man given £18million of taxpayers' money to amuse and entertain the nation on the airwaves. Dwell on that amount for a few seconds while you work out how to pay this week's food and petrol bills.

What you probably don't expect for all that hard-earned cash is that Ross will use it to abuse and insult a kind, gentle, well-loved, 78-year-old actor with gratuitous sexual sneers about his granddaughter.

It is a useful maxim of life that mistakes happen; what counts is how they are dealt with. I checked into a hotel a while ago. When I flushed the toilet in my room, sewage spilled out. I was incandescent when I rang reception. But they sent someone up instantly who packed all my belongings and moved me to another room. There was nothing more they could have done, and so impressed was I by how they dealt with the mistake that I now recommend the hotel to people, rather than warning them away.

The reaction of the BBC to the mistake - whether it was Brand's, Ross's or that by whoever was producing and supervising them -  has been deplorable. First, no reaction at all. It took until Monday - nine days after the broadcast - for the BBC even to bother apologising to Andrew Sachs. His grandaughter has yet to be offered anything. Then yesterday it began a slovenly, bureacratic attempt to push the problem away by handing it over to some pen pushing nonentity. 

They really don't have a clue, do they? It is screamingly clear that the upper echelon of the BBC don't even begin to understand why so many people are so angry. Mark Thompson - a useless specimen at the best of times - is apparently on holiday, and this is suppsedly why he has yet to make any comment. Has he never heard of the phone? This is not some minor storm in a tea cup.  The Prime Minister is involved, for goodness' sake. Thompson is clearly doing his level best to ensure that others take responsibility, while he swims along in calm waters, oblivious to any sense of honour or duty.

This episode goes to the very heart of what is wrong with the BBC - a self-appointed, luxuriously paid, back-scratching, public opinion-oblivious media elite which is interested only in pushing its own agenda on the rest of us, at our expense. When will be rid of this puffed up anachronism?

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