Jumping on the Brand Wagon

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that the actions of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross in leaving obscene messages on Andrew Sachs’ voice mail is utterly reprehensible and the content of said messages offensive. They both deserve everything that they get. However, why has this story come to dominate the headlines in this country for the past few days? It isn’t as if there isn’t anything else going on, what with the economic crisis, US Presidential elections, wars, earthquakes, murders, the ongoing inquest into the death of the innocent Brazilian gunned down by the police and the like. But no, apparently the one urgent issue which the Prime Minister and various rent-a-quote Tories feel the need to address is the earth-shattering matter of a couple of over-paid celebrities swearing down a phone line. Distressing though the incident must have been or their victim (the only person to have come out of this with any credibility – Mr Sachs seems a genuinely decent person, who simply wanted an apology, not a media circus), it really doesn’t warrant this level of fuss. The BBC has reportedly received over 30,000 complaints about the offensive broadcast – which sounds impressive until you realise that most of these complainants hadn’t actually heard it, merely heard about it from the press. In reality, the original broadcast received only two complaints.

Once again, a media frenzy has been whipped up by the right-wing, anti-BBC press, and people have, as ever, been stupid enough to go along with it and form any angry, ignorant, mob. There is nothing worse than the kind of moron who finds themselves retrospectively offended by something – how many of those people complaining to the BBC heard the broadcast, but didn’t complain at the time, I wonder? Probably a high proportion. They didn’t know they’d been offended until the papers told them they’d been. Even worse are those offended by proxy – they didn’t actually hear it, but if they had, they would have been offended, judging by what the papers said had been said on air. What I find offensive is the way these self-righteous bastards in the press have tried to conflate the whole sorry incident and claim that it is somehow indicative of a more general lowering of standards at the BBC and, by extension, in wider society. Even the PM has started describing Ross and Brand as role models – thereby implying that their poor behaviour is somehow responsible for a wider malaise in society. What utter bollocks! Quite apart from the fact that these two pillocks aren’t role models for anybody, let alone Britain’s youth, the idea that social breakdown is the result of people copying the behaviour of celebrities is ludicrous. The coarsening of our society has more to do with the concerted assaults made on our public services, education system and arts by Thatcher in the 1980s. The attitudes of selfishness, greed and materialism inculcated by her and championed by her lapdogs in the self same newspapers lambasting Ross and Brand, have done far more to undermine basic values of decency and respect than any egotistical celebrities.