A wicked nor’ westerly wind sliced through my protective layers this morning, a real soul-chiller permeating all layers, rendering my
Thierry Henris redundant. I plodded westward, digesting the latest details of an absurd ‘row’ that’s blown up in recent days regarding the BBC and
that phone call.
Two popular entertainers (Mr Jonathan Ross and Mr Russell Brand) conspired to make a lewd and profane prank phone call to Mr Andrew Sachs, a 78 year old actor best known for his portrayal of Manuel, the put-upon Spanish waiter in the classic BBC sitcom Fawltey Towers. It's an interesting aside that Mr Sachs made his name portraying a highly racist stereotype which at the time apparently drew no complaints.
The call apparently detailed Mr Brand’s carnal knowledge of Mr Sach’s grand-daughter, herself a 23 year-old member of burlesque performance outfit known as the Satanic Sluts. If this all sound rather puerile and sordid it undoubtedly is. What has occurred since this alleged piece of ‘cutting edge comedy’ was broadcast – late at night and no, like most of the complainants and sabre-rattlers filling the airwaves today I didn’t hear it – is a mighty furore whipped up by that bastion of right-minded thinking and morally acceptable behaviour, the
Daily Mail.
To illustrate their part in this at time of broadcast (and in the hours that followed) the BBC received precisely two complaints from listeners unhappy with the nature of the item. After the
Mail on Sunday published a puce-faced, outraged-of-Croydon tub-thumper about misuse of licence-payers money the Beeb received upward of
ten thousand calls from ‘irate’ readers.
The Daily Mail is a woeful rag. Swollen with lazy, scaremonger journalism it preys on the conscience and anxiety of its mainly older readership. What last week was deemed by an ‘expert’ as good for us will this week send us into terminal decline and end civilisation as we know it. The
Mail should have one standard daily headline: DON’T GO OUTSIDE! I can’t abide it’s self-congratulatory, all-seeing all-knowing nose-in-the-air smugness . I condemn Mrs S for buying the damned thing as she does from time to time 'for the horroscopes'. Distraught of West Sussex is calling for vocational decapitation and the masses are responding. The outcome is of course a good deal of free publicity of the young lady and her band (whom few of us had heard of before this became the lead story on a BBC newscast that also features global recession, job losses, wounded and killed in war-torn parts of the world and an amusing tale about a drunken giraffe) and a nice chunk of change for that doyenne of disaster, publicist and serial celebrity apologist Max Clifford.
I do have an issue with all this. It’s not that Messrs Ross and Brand are paid considerable sums of money to entertain us – I’m sure we as a nation get the broadcasters we deserve. By–and-large Mr Brand is a witty and in many ways unique talent. Mr Ross commands a salary, paid via the BBC licence fee, reputed to be in the neighbourhood of six million pounds per annum. I reckon we’re entitled to something a little better than a smutty recorded ‘phone call in which Mr Ross screams foul and abusive language over the top of Mr Brand as the latter explains in some detail how he once deflowered Mr Sach’s grand-daughter. The truth is that Ross’s on-screen/ radio persona is largely built on free use of foul language and sexual innuendo, all very funny on occasion but hardly unique or indeed admirable comic talents. His interviews consist of a few pertinent questions (followed by one or two impertinent ones) which the interviewee is given less than no time to answer. Ross then rides roughshod over their attempts to speak, playing the ugly pinstriped ape to their unwitting straight man or woman. It's peak time trash but there it is; the man is apparently very popular.
But that’s not it either. No, what has me up in arms this morning is the appalling case of double standards at the BBC.
If I were a depressed Crystal Palace fan and I were to have called Danny Baker on his 606 phone-in show last night (broadcast live between 10 and 11pm) to complain in bitter and impassioned tones about the ineffectual nature of the overpaid monkeys I support in falling to lowly Nottingham Forrest, and in the process use just one unholy swearword, or perhaps suggest that Alan Green is a rampant and unashamed Liverpool fan
, I would be instantly cut off. There would then follow a solemn and hush-toned apology to ‘any listeners offended’ by my ‘obscene language’. Indeed I have heard callers on the BBC ticked off for casual use of the unacceptably loathsome ‘bloody’. Same goes for the excellent Stephen Nolan weekend phone-ins when topics are a good deal more hardcore than mere sport, where temperatures can and do reach boiling point. At around the same time, down a series of dusky hallowed halls in Shepherds Bush, Mr Ross – or indeed
Mr Frankie Boyle, a Mock the Week regular who has a brand of foul-mouthed and unsettling humour that’s actually quite funny - would be recording his latest masterpiece including no end of expletives. So what is it BBC? It’s OK for so-called comedians to hurl profanities and sexual innuendo at various ‘soft targets’ watched or listened to by millions but woe betide any of the great unwashed who throws a few fucks into a lively debate?
Frankly speaking Auntie, that’s bollocks.
