Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross deserve all the opprobrium being poured on them over their phone calls to Andrew Sachs boasting about Brand’s relationship with Sachs’ granddaughter. Their behaviour was as pathetic as it was boorish. But there is a broader point here, what on earth is the public service justification for Brand’s show?
Brand and Ross were providing precisely the kind of lowest common-denominator humour that advocates of the licence fee tell us would dominate the airwaves without public subsidy. Leaving aside the offensiveness of their calls to Sachs, there really does seem to be no justification for having the licence fee support the base comedy that Brand and Ross peddle.
The licence fee is defensible when it is used to provide things that the market would not but that are necessary for an informed and rounded citizenry. But there really can be no justification for using it to feather the nests of those who coarsen our society.
PS However deplorable this incident may be you do have to wonder whether isn’t over-kill for the Today Programme to devote both the 7.10 and 8.10 slots to it. One might be forgiven for thinking that this suggests that the BBC is rather self-obsessed.
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