Terry Grimley: It’s not over yet for BBC
If there is something to be said this morning for Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand – and frankly I’m struggling – it is the fact that they have momentarily broken the vice-like grip of the US elections and the collapse of world capitalism on the news agenda.
Commentators were queueing up yesterday to lambast the hapless pair’s unedifying prank in leaving “lewd” messages on the answer phone of former Fawlty Towers star Andrew Sachs. Condemnation of their schoolboy behaviour was universal but not instantaneous.
The offence was apparently committed on October 18, but it was a week until the media pack burst into life, led by the Mail on Sunday.
There is naturally scarce sympathy for Brand and Ross, not least because they are perceived as grossly overpaid as well over-boorish. “Hubristic rich bullies” was the admirably succinct way one internet poster summed them up.
But what many are finding more disturbing is the failure of the BBC hierarchy to ensure that its star turns were kept within the bounds of reasonably good taste, with the BBC itself holding up its hand to a “systemic failure”. Well, I’m sorry to say I told you so, but we’ve been here before.
A few months ago I wrote in this column about my disbelief at seeing an item on Lily Allen’s BBC3 show in which video clips sent in by viewers included one in which a boy ran up behind a teacher and pulled his trousers down.
It struck me as staggering that the BBC would actively encourage classroom indiscipline, let alone actual physical assault. How could it be reconciled with hand-wringing about antisocial behaviour on programmes like Newsnight?
The BBC got away with that one scot-free, merely omitting the offending clip from its website.
Maybe it’s because our economic certainties are currently up in the air that we are predisposed to a moment of soul-searching, and the BBC’s Sachsgate does seem to have many of us wondering about how far British culture has descended into coarseness and cruelty.
Yesterday Brand deployed the Ken Livingstone defence, suggesting that while it was true he had been a bit naughty, the Daily Mail had been much naughtier in the 1930s in endorsing Hitler and his British followers. While I would normally say that no opportunity should be missed of reminding the Daily Mail of its one-time enthusiasm for fascism, in this context it sounded desperate and more than a bit tacky.
Clearly there is a serious issue to be addressed at the BBC, but has some of the reaction been a touch over the top?
According to Mail on Sunday columnist Melanie Phillips: “Long, long ago the BBC was a noble institution, supposed to have a mission to inform, educate and entertain. Now its mission appears to be to degrade, coarsen and brutalise.”
She is describing an organisation which runs five full-time orchestras and the Proms, which were condemned by New Labour’s Margaret Hodge last year as “elitist”. Can we please concede that the BBC is still doing something right?
