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Extreme measures

Simon Hoggart

Wednesday, 5th November 2008

Simon Hoggart on the latest television broadcasts

I watched Russell Brand’s Ponderland (Channel 4, Thursday) if only so that you don’t have to. It’s rather lazy, like the unpleasant message he and Jonathan Ross left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone and then broadcast on Radio Two. You’d think that if they were going to be offensive to a well-loved old thespian gent they would have laced it with wit — some tonic and lemon to go with the gall. In a gruesome way, what made it even more awful was the fact that Brand really did sleep with Sachs’s granddaughter. In the old days, a gentleman never bandied a woman’s name about. Now you can boast to her old granddad that you’ve shagged her, and tell everyone at home as well. I sometimes fear that one day, before too long, we shall see a spectacle like the end of an old Quatermass serial, as a terrifying phantom, a pillar of smoke and flames hundreds of feet high, forms over Broadcasting House. Older employees will recognise the gigantic face of Lord Reith before the apparition consumes them and all BBC staff, including the ones who make Little Dorrit and the David Attenborough programmes, for this will be the apocalypse and not even the worthy will be saved.

Sorry, back to Russell Brand. The programme shows clips from genuine television programmes, often very old. The one I saw was about education. It would have been a bold comedy step for him to say, ‘Look, I was pretty well educated, which is why my best-selling autobiography is rather gracefully written. All this kit, the tight trousers and the mad hair that makes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall look like Denis Compton in a Brylcreem ad, are just to convey a phoney air of rebellion...’ Of course he didn’t. He presented himself as a wild, scapegrace truant because that’s the easy thing to do. And along the way he made cruel fun of some innocent people — teachers for the most part — who were just doing their job. ‘This teacher is a right oppressive tit,’ he said of one man who had nothing that I could see to deserve it. At least this show isn’t on the BBC. Possibly they’re saving their money for another series of Hole in the Wall.

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