The Russell Brand revelations have prompted much soul-searching in recent days from hand-wringing hacks fretting about the norms of the noughties. Leading the charge today is Marina Hyde, the toast of centrist dads everywhere. She has written in the Guardian about her angst concerning the infamous ‘Sachsgate’ episode of Brand’s career. Back in October 2008, Brand and his Radio 2 show co-host Jonathan Ross phoned Andrew Sachs – Manuel from Fawlty Towers – and left lewd messages on his voice machine, boasting about Brand’s past sexual relationship with Sachs’ granddaughter, Georgina Baillie.
Battle lines were drawn. Charles Moore was so appalled at this that he said he refused to pay his TV license until Brand had been fired. Hyde dismissed the episode completely and went after Baillie. Looking back now, she writes that:
When the Brand expose broke last weekend, I found myself transported back to that time. And with my 2023 head on, rather sickening alarm bells began to ring, because I knew – I knew – that I wouldn’t have centred anything I wrote about it on Georgina Baillie. I had this shaming suspicion I had treated it as a sort of media story – and so it proved… A year later, Baillie sold an interview and underwear photoshoot to the Sun in which she said the media maelstrom had sent her “insane”, subsequently telling the Guardian she was “a tart with a heart, a nice girl”. I am mortified to see I reacted to this by saying she should stop banging on about the whole thing.
But the famously acerbic Hyde did centre what she wrote on Ms Baillie. Her aforementioned 2009 article went in, studs-up, on Sachs’ granddaughter saying she had ‘managed to parlay Russell Brand’s insult to her dignity into an excruciatingly candid red-top buy-up and a number of semi-mucky photoshoots’. Having broken ‘another ten second silence’, Hyde had a go at Baillie’s Sun column which, she said, was ‘unlikely to give PJ O’Rourke any sleepless nights’.
Attempt to gain some sort of purchase on this latest Jonathan Ross “outrage”, the details of which I literally cannot be bothered to even look up, let alone confect horror over. The world can now be divided into people who genuinely think caring about this crap is important, and people you might wish to know socially. Anyway, about halfway down Georgina manages to wrench the subject matter back to herself – she hasn’t the most gossamer of authorial touches, bless her – as she drones: “I then realised that although he had sent a letter of apology to my family, he never actually directly addressed me with an apology….” Georgina, Georgina, Georgina… In the name of all human sanity: please just let it go. They were total scumbags, but it’s over. O-V-A-H.
So in her mea culpa, Hyde rather skirts over the fact that back in 2009 she indulged in what she might now call victim-blaming. The new left goes after the old left and, now, left-wing writers go after their former selves. Hyde does, at least, have the decency to hold herself up to scrutiny and call it “mortifying”. All the more, perhaps, since she ought to agree, now, that Charles Moore was right all along.
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