At a moment where celeb stories have preoccupied the tabloids – including Kerry Katona slurring her words on This Morning and Simon Cowell laying into Peter Kay’s comedy character Geraldine keeping his own creation from number one – the furore over Rossgate/Brandgate has topped the lot. Many a handwringing editorial and indepth studio discussion has pondered questions including where the boundaries of taste and decency lie, the mismatch of this stunt with the Reithian ethos of the BBC as a public service institution, risk-taking in broadcasting and the pay that our biggest stars can command. Surely behind the ‘off the their heads’ lynch mob mentality directed at the two broadcasters, there are a wider set of issues around youth culture.
This whole furore occurred at the once oldies fave station Radio 2: exemplifying the juvenilisation of our media and pervasiveness of lad culture. It’s noteworthy that the offending incident only provoked two complaints at the time of its airing. The 37,000 – and still rising – tally only mounted up after encouragement from various newspapers. Part of the reason why the customary tabloid outrage seems to have gone into overdrive on this one is the contempt of what used to be Fleet Street for the corporation and the way the BBC website has eaten into their sales by providing a free, up-to-the-minute trusted news service, changing behaviours of how we access our headlines.
Behind all this Disgusted of Tonbridge Wells mentality there is a silent majority who are seeing this issue as having assumed a significance out if all proportion. The vast bulk of these are the young who are not persuaded by old media and are more open to thinking for themselves, having seen the YouTube footage and made their decision rather than relying on Red-top editorials. The same applies to politics. In the age of web2 and the blogosphere the old style negative advertising techniques that placed Bushes into the White House over a 20-year timespan play least well of all to the first-time voters that Obama is chasing.
The whole Ross/Brand affair has also been conflated with distaste at the former’s multimillion pound salary. His remuneration package is deemed to be particularly obscene in these credit-crunching times. Yet solutions proposed have included, quite bizarrely, scrapping the licence fee. The class warrior in me might have some sympathy with the idea of curbing the pay of the likes of Ross which has come from the public purse. I can see the logic that if the BBC wants to get the audiences it wants it may have to outbid the commercial sector. But ditching the corporation’s unique system of funding makes no sense to me. It is the BBC’s non-reliance on advertising revenue that has allowed it to innovate. Back in the 1980s the BBC was instrumental in creating a genre of non-sexist, non-racist humour that was known as ‘alternative comedy’, a welcome antidote to the old-school mother-in-law type jokes that were doing the rounds at the time. Sadly the true ideals of alternative comedy seem to have been overlooked in this rather tasteless and crass episode but the reaction has far outweighed the broadcast.
The granddaughter Georgina Baillie has demonstrated herself to be not backward at coming forward. Her exact words were that ‘justice has been done’ when Brand resigned. She has hired the services of Max Clifford who has spun some amazing headlines such as the revelation that Brand used to yell ‘Que?’ when the couple were in bed together. Both presenters have presented themselves as a picture of contrition. Brand has walked the plank and Ross had his pay docked. In the meantime demand for Fawlty Towers CDs have skyrocketed overnight, just in time for Christmas. The man who played Manuel has declared that he’s prepared to let the matter lie. I expect Ross to make a fulsome apology to Sachs sometime in the not too distant future on his show. Stay tuned!