The Ross/Brand thingy...

[Nibble]

Is just a massive distraction blown up by the government and it's sympathetic tabloids to divert attention away from the fact that they are screwing us fiscally (ooh err).

The nation has fallen for it hook line and sinker and so have most on NSC.

This has been the real news.

 

[Dick Knights Mumm]

The Mail protecting the government again ?

 

[Nemesis]

Is it April 1st already?

 

[Curious Orange]

I can't see what all the fuss is about to be honest. I think all prank calls are crass, but I don't see why it should become a national "issue" all of a sudden, people have being doing this sort of bollocks on TV and radio for years, is it just because this time it is a celebrity that was on the receiving end instead of some member of the public?

 

[Boris Yeltsin]

I think Ross and Brand should be put on the Sachs Offenders Register

 

[Dick Knights Mumm]

I think Ross and Brand should be put on the Sachs Offenders Register

boom-boom.

excellent.

 

[Man of Harveys]

I think Ross and Brand should be put on the Sachs Offenders Register

Top notch

 

[Brovion]

I think the whole thing was got up by Max Clifford to get publicity for Sachs' granddaughters dance/theatre group or whatever. People say that Brand and Ross humiliated him, but can you imagine how he felt telling his friends about his granddaughter's group? Imagine the scene at Sach's golf or bowling club:

Friend: "What's your granddaughter doing these days?"
Sachs: "Oh, er, she's in a dance troupe."
Friend: "What you mean something like the Young Generation; good wholesome boys and girls who used to be on the Rolf Harris show?"
Sachs: "Er, no, they're called 'Satan's Sluts' actually."

 

[Tricky Dicky]

Is just a massive distraction blown up by the government and it's sympathetic tabloids to divert attention away from the fact that they are screwing us fiscally (ooh err).

The nation has fallen for it hook line and sinker and so have most on NSC.

This has been the real news.

People got bored of the global financial crisis, Wossy was next in line. If it had happened the day Lehmans went bust, i doubt you'll have ever heard about it.

 

[csider]

2 people complained when on air.............!!!

You do the math!!

 

[Superphil]

I think the whole thing was got up by Max Clifford to get publicity for Sachs' granddaughters dance/theatre group or whatever.

I think that is most probably right. I bet their forward bookings are through the roof right now. I imagine Manuel os very proud.

 

[Superphil]

Thinking about all this, is it not a little ironic? This the whole thing has been put up there, as depraved, offensive, filthy, disgusting, yet the subject of the whole thing, Sachs granddaughter, makes a living portaying depravity, filth, disgust and generally actions deemed offensive by many many more people than those who complained to the BBC.

 

[Tony Meolas Loan Spell]

Personally I think its because the BBC pay Woss a HIDEOUS amount of money and want him out.

Dont blame them. I dont want MY licence fee money paying for a talentless twat like that. Overpaid. You f***ing bet.

Every time I see him Im reminded of Rob Newmans EXCELLENT impersonation of him:

Quickly says: fwub wub wub wub wub (tilts back head)aha,
Quickly says:wub fwub fwub fwub wub (tilts back head) aha.
Etc

 

[Tom Bombadil]

It's like we've travelled back in time 50 years. The whole thing is completely overblown.

 

[Twinkle Toes]

Thinking about all this, is it not a little ironic? This the whole thing has been put up there, as depraved, offensive, filthy, disgusting, yet the subject of the whole thing, Sachs granddaughter, makes a living portaying depravity, filth, disgust and generally actions deemed offensive by many many more people than those who complained to the BBC.

Well said Sir!

ps Do you know if they're doing any shows locally - as I will certainly have to go & see them as, ahem, a local arbiter of taste & decency?

 

[Wozza]

Personally I think its because the BBC pay Woss a HIDEOUS amount of money and want him out.Etc

Because the BBC pay Ross a hideous amount of money and THE DAILY MAIL want him out (and 'lefty' BBC execs fired, and people to have no fun).

 

[Brovion]

Thinking about all this, is it not a little ironic? This the whole thing has been put up there, as depraved, offensive, filthy, disgusting, yet the subject of the whole thing, Sachs granddaughter, makes a living portaying depravity, filth, disgust and generally actions deemed offensive by many many more people than those who complained to the BBC.

Yeah, I said on one of the other threads that no one comes out of this well. Rather like in football 6 million quid doesn't apparently buy much comedic talent these days, but whilst I think Brand and Ross behaved like a couple of pissed undergrads doing a tasteless ragweek stunt I cannot fathom the mindset of the people who complained - having not heard it!

Then I found out that Max Clifford was involved. It's hard to shake the feeling that once he found out about the broadcast he subtly pushed the snowball down the mountain in order to get BUCKETS of publicity for Manuel's granddaughter and Satan's Sluts.

 

[keaton]

Two very good articles about the fuss


Charlie Brooker

So it's here at last. The dawn of the dumb has broken in earnest. Two mistakes occur - first Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross overstep the mark with an ill-advised bit of juvenilia, then someone decides to broadcast it. Two listeners complained, but that's by the by: it shouldn't have gone out. But then the Daily Mail - not so much a newspaper as an idiot's guidebook issued in bite-size daily instalments - uses the incident as the starting point for a full-blown moral crusade. Suddenly everyone's complaining, whether they heard the broadcast or not, largely on the basis of hysterical, boggle-eyed descriptions of what the pair said. Poor Andrew Sachs, who, having been wronged, graciously accepted their apologies and called for everybody to move on, looked bewildered by the sheer number of cameras stuck in his face. Because, by then, apologies weren't enough.

The Mail was so incensed, it printed a full transcript of the answerphone prankery under the heading "Lest We Forget" - and helpfully included outtakes that weren't even broadcast, so its readers could be enraged by things no one had heard in the first place. This was like making a point about the cruelty of fox-hunting by ripping a live fox apart with your bare hands, then poking a rabbit's eye out with a pen for good measure.

And now, like a lion developing a taste for human flesh after munching on a bit of discarded leg, the paper is on the hunt for fresh victims. First up: Brand's Channel 4 comedy show Ponderland. Readers were treated to a blow-by-blow account of what kind of depravity they could expect to see if they tuned in that evening.

"As his closing joke, he performs a graphic mime of sexual acts on a butterfly."

Funniest. Daily Mail sentence. Ever.

Friday's paper included a rundown of other "obscenities" broadcast by the Beeb, which the paper fearlessly "uncovered" by recording some TV shows and writing down some of the jokes. To protect readers' sensibilities, all the rude words were sprinkled with asterisks, although since the Mail's definition of "rude" extends to biological terms such as "penis", it was a bit like gazing at an ASCII representation of a snowstorm on a ZX Spectrum circa 1983. Perhaps next week it will produce a free sheet of asterisk stickers for readers to plaster over their own genitals, lest they catch sight of them in a mirror and indignantly vomit themselves into a coma.

One of the shows singled out was an episode of the romcom Love Soup transmitted in April that, the Mail insisted, depicted a woman being raped by a dog. I didn't see the show myself, but I doubt you saw it going in or anything, because I don't recall seeing Mark Thompson hanging from a lamppost while an angry mob kicked Television Centre to pieces. Maybe we can "devolve" to that point in time for Christmas.

Still, if it's OK to be retrospectively enraged, why stop at April? Be ambitious! Keep going! There's an endless list of comedy shows that would qualify for the Mail's hall of shame. How about Monty Python, which in 1970 included a gloriously tasteless sketch about a man eating his mother's corpse, then puking the remains into a grave? If Python had been banned, we'd never have seen Fawlty Towers or heard of Andrew Sachs in the first place - problem solved. Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, Porridge, Not the Nine O'Clock News, The Young Ones, Have I Got News For You, Blackadder, The Day Today, Little Britain, The Thick of It ... by the Mail's reckoning, each of those shows surely deserves a place on the list too. Hundreds of hours of laughter you'd never have had.

The sad, likely outcome of this pitiful gitstorm is an increase in BBC jumpiness. I have a vested interest in this, of course, because I've just started work on the next series of my BBC4 show Screen Wipe, on which we sometimes sail close to the wind. In the past, the BBC has occasionally stepped in to nix the odd line that oversteps the mark - as it should do, when parameters aren't out of whack.

But when the Beeb's under fire, those parameters can change. Last year, following the "fakery" scandals, we recorded a trailer for the series in which I mocked a BBC4 ident featuring footage of seagulls, by fooling around with a plastic seagull on a stick and muttering about how you couldn't trust anything on TV any more. Pure Crackerjack. But suddenly it couldn't be transmitted, due to "the current climate". So God knows how restrictive things might get over the coming months.

And that's just my basic, low-level gittery. If something as sublime and revolutionary as Python came along today, the Mail would try to kill it stone dead, and it'd rope in thousands of angry old idiots to help, all of them bravely marching to the Ofcom website to register their disgust. What a rush. Feel that pipsqueak throb of empowerment coursing through your starched and joyless veins! You've crushed some fun, and it feels good to be alive!

Perhaps it's time to put a "Complain to Ofcom" button right there on the remote control: if enough viewers press it, the show gets yanked immediately, like a bad variety act being pulled off stage by a shepherd's crook.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's time to establish "Counter-Complaints": a method of registering your complaint about the number of knee-jerk complaints. And one should cancel out the other - so if 25,000 people complain, and a further 25,000 counter-complain, the total number of complaints is zero. It might lead to a lot of fruitless button-mashing, but at least we can keep our shared national culture relatively sane. Because judging by the rest of the news, if the ship's going down, a few unrestricted taste-free laughs now and then might make things more bearable for all of us.

• This week Charlie became so dismayed by the number of things in his flat that need fixing, that he contemplated doing nothing: "And seeing how long it'll take for the entire structure to collapse."

How little Britain found its voice
Comments ()


·

David Mitchell
The Observer,
Sunday November 2 2008
Article history
This has been a week in which Britain has come together. Through the mists of economic and environmental collapse, we have stumbled upon a beacon of hope that, while briefly setting fire to our trousers, has also lit a path of unity. We have formed a rare national consensus, a determination to stand side by side in the name of something we all believe in and agree upon. Not since the Second World War have we felt such moral certainty, such comforting, righteous anger.

We will let the world know that, if there's one thing our country stands for, it's this: we don't think people should ring up respected actors and say they've had sex with their granddaughters. And not only do we all think that people shouldn't do that, we also all firmly believe that when they do, they shouldn't then put it on the radio. Everyone thinks this now - even the people that did it. Brilliant.

Of course the consensus-hating cynics would say that we've merely lathered ourselves into such a hysterical fever that we've spent a week repeating and re-repeating a conclusion so bleedin' obvious that Sybil Fawlty should be answering questions on it on Mastermind. They'd say we've taken a lapse in taste and judgment that was egregious but, by any reasonable definition, not particularly harmful, and which has been apologised for by everyone concerned and turned it into an excuse for a moral crusade.

That, in a country racked by social and economic problems that cannot be blamed on a couple of celebrities, we've grasped at a tiny issue purely for the assuaging effect of its ethical clarity. That we've allowed some people to disguise their envy and rage at two men's success and wealth as concern for the feelings of a much-loved elderly actor. But those cynics are just killjoys who won't accept what a fantastic step forward for our civilisation we've collectively made. It's right up there with when we all insightfully concluded that it's a shame when a princess dies in a car crash.

I'm sure we can now move on to even bolder collective assertions: 'Kids shouldn't ring doorbells and then run away'; 'Post Office closures in rural areas cause widespread inconvenience'; 'Donkey homelessness is a crying shame.' Human homelessness is a bit more ambiguous, so it's probably best to steer clear of that. I mean the humans concerned might have been unruly at school or taken heroin - before you know it, they'll be on the radio claiming to have given Yootha Joyce's great-nephew a blowjob - but donkeys should definitely have somewhere to live. And I bet there are 30,000 people just begging to complain about any contention that they shouldn't.

Because it's been a particularly lovely week for those 30,000 and rising who've found the time in their undoubtedly busy schedules to thank the BBC for taking the trouble to offend them. Obviously, 29,998 of them missed the broadcast, but thanks to the miracle of YouTube and our dispassionate, fact-printing media, they've all had the opportunity to catch up and get their fix of what offends them.

They're an odd bunch, these people who actually enjoy being offended. Some would call them perverts but I, in common with much of the media, think that in our new inclusive society, their fetish should be indulged. In fact, live and let live, it should be celebrated. It's harmless, if incredibly weird, and they're an important and growing demographic. In fact, I'm thinking of pitching a TV show specifically targeted at them called Why Don't You All Go and f*** Yourselves!? I imagine it'll be a hit.

And the fun doesn't stop there. As well as us all being able to hold close to us the warming thought that we shouldn't leave rude answerphone messages, a significant minority of 'liberals' (you know, musicians, comedians, pornographers and the like - I count myself in this group) can be further comforted by their own little consensusette that too much fuss has been made. 'Too much is being written about it,' we write about it. 'It's ridiculous - no one mentions anything else!' we cry, not mentioning anything else.

The truth is that this whole farrago has been a hell of a lot of fun for all but about four people in the entire world and that's more than can be said about the earthquake in Pakistan or the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo or the terrorist bombings in India.

But all good things come to an end and, in this case, as in so many, the joy dies with the involvement of politicians. Apart from the fact that you'd think Gordon Brown and David Cameron would want to seem too busy to concern themselves with a Radio 2 show that went wrong, it's never a good idea for politicians to get involved with comedy. From Margaret Thatcher's Yes Minister sketch to Tony Blair's 'Am I Bovvered?' appearance, their attempts to associate themselves with humour have generally been awful. The reason for this is that they don't really care what's funny.

Being funny involves taking risks and no politician, except possibly Boris Johnson, can understand why anyone would take the slightest risk of public disapproval in order to get a laugh. They're about power; they don't understand the instinct to amuse and that's why Vince Cable's pretty unfunny remark about Gordon Brown being transformed 'from Stalin to Mr Bean' has led to his being acclaimed a great parliamentary wit. Well, it might make them fall about in the Commons, but it would barely raise a smirk at Wimbledon, where even a pigeon perching on the net gets guffaws.

Now the risks taken in Russell Brand's offending radio broadcast are pretty baffling, it must be said, and what happened was wrong, as both Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand accept. But the instinct to take risks is vital to being funny and is why Ross and Brand are so successful and I'm confident will continue to be. Comedians can't self-censor before their every remark or they won't get laughs - politicians must or they won't get votes.

The latter could not be worse placed to judge the successes and failures of the former and if, as a result of this absurd furore, the 'on message' word-watching of politics is imposed on comedy, then we may none of us crack a smile again.

 

[Tooting Gull]

It's like we've travelled back in time 50 years. The whole thing is completely overblown.

Not really. 50 years ago it wouldn't have been considered hilarious to say someone f****d an old man's granddaughter on the radio. It's not exactly social progress, is it?

Unfortunately I think a lot of the comment on here is more driven by people's prejudice towards the Daily Mail rather than the actual incident. Ironic, really. They're even more prejudiced than the Mail itself. If there is nothing the Mail could ever print that people would give them credit for (or even read), then they are every bit as closed-minded as those they claim to despise.

And everyone should be able to differentiate between satire, cutting-edge drama, and other programmes that may offend some people but deserve to be broadcast - and two idiots who went too far in an inappropriate context and deserved what they got.

Oh, and that Sachs Offenders Register is genius -

 

[Tom Bombadil]

Thanks Tooting Gull for illustrating my point.