Shared opinion | 1 November 2008

The real BBC scandal is that John Prescott
has been allowed to talk about class

Obviously, the senior powers at the BBC should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. What a cock-up. What a failure of leadership. What a grubby betrayal of Reithian values. Is our licence fee really well spent on this gibbering nonsense? What were they thinking of? Why did they commission a two-part documentary on class from John Prescott?

Russell Brand on class; that could have been interesting. He’d have prank-called the poor and told them he’d shagged their pets, perhaps, but at least he might have approached the subject matter with a relatively open mind. Jonathan Ross, too, although he’d probably have got bored like he always does, and started telling Lord Onslow that he was ‘a very good-looking man’ while absent-mindedly rubbing his own thighs. Prescott, though, was a missed opportunity. Did you see it? Maybe you saw a bit of it. No journey. No discovery. He just wandered around Britain not knowing things, and not learning them, either.

What class are Brand and Ross? Tricky. Both middling, I’d say. Ross, state-educated, but the son of a radio presenter, and apparently unrelated to anybody who doesn’t work in the media. Brand has a rougher edge, but he has been a stage-school brat since his teens. Bit of a fight, I’d have thought, to hold on to that accent. Both of them, y’know, speak the way that Tony Blair always tried to. Professionally, they’re safe facsimiles of the working class. Just posh enough not to mind that they aren’t posher. The Beeb is exactly where they belong.