Saturday, November 01, 2008

Ross and Brand

Russell Brand, 33, and Jonathon Ross, 47, are two well known radio presenters who were paid huge amounts of money by the BBC to present music and chat shows on radio and television. One night the Brand show, with Ross as a guest, broadcast a telephone call made to the answering machine of Andrew Sachs, 78, an actor best known for his performance as Manuel in Fawlty Towers. The content of the call was a boast by Brand that he had slept with Sachs’s young granddaughter, a singer in a girl-band. The boast was couched in obscene terms and contravenes a British law about sending obscene messages over the telephone. The broadcast received only two complaints, but an alert reporter on the Daily Mail picked up on it and published a piece criticizing the broadcast.

The newspaper article unleashed a frenzied attack on the BBC and the two disc-jockeys. There have now been over 35,000 complaints against the BBC. As a result Brand has resigned and so has the chief executive of the Radio 2, the channel which hosted the broadcast. Ross, the highest paid performer on the BBC has been suspended without pay for 12 weeks while his future employment is considered.

Further information has emerged. It turns out that the broadcast item had been pre-recorded, and must therefore have been approved by an editor and also that the Brand boast was not an idle one; he and the girl had been in a ‘relationship’ for a while last year. It was, nevertheless and ungentlemanly thing to do as well as being illegal. In the meantime another broadcasting offence has been uncovered. ‘Mock the Week’ made lewdly offensive remarks about the Queen and the ‘Disgusted’ of Tunbridge Wells tendency has redirected its attack there.

What has been astonishing is how an after-midnight broadcast, listen to by very few, has caused such a national furore. It is symptomatic of a general unease among middle class, middle-aged Britain.

It has to be remembered that 1947 was the year when Britain’s birth rate was at its greatest. Those born in that year are now 61. They comprise a large slice of the population and, moreover, many are relatively well-off, many are retired and those who are not often hold down jobs of great influence. This is not a constituency to be trifled with. Although, many of these ‘baby-boomers’ were young at the time of the loosening of moral standards in the sixties and seventies and may be thought complicit in the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll revolution, by and large this generation heartily disapproves of Ross, Brand and their ilk.

There are several reasons for this. Many were always opposed to what went on in the sixties and seventies. There was a vanguard of revolutionaries clustered in the capital and infiltrating the media. The Beatles may have come from Liverpool, but they soon made their way to London. The ‘Swinging Sixties’ were centred on Carnaby Street not Coronation Street. I was at a provincial university at this time and never encountered a single spliff. My friends were not sexually promiscuous and nice girls still waited until they were married. We may have approved of David Frost and ‘That Was The Week, That Was’, but their targets were the rich and powerful, not defenceless old men.

The lifestyle ‘enjoyed’ by those in the vanguard was hardly conducive to longevity. Many of those who persisted with it are by now the victims of drug overdose, liver failure, AIDS, cocaine-induced heart attacks, or lung cancer. The hard-core of revolutionaries has been diluted by the conservative majority.

Then, again, there is the natural tendency for people to become more conservative as they get older. You plead harder for the have-nots when you are poor than when you become one of the ‘haves’. This is not the whole story. With age comes experience and the more perceptive have seen what the social changes have brought us in the past forty years. It is hard to applaud the fact that we now need many more prisons, that homicides have risen from about 160 to nearer 1000, that divorces have reached an all-time high, that parents are afraid to allow their children to walk to school for fear of abduction, and that gangs of young people walk around our cities at weekends armed with knives and too drunk to know what they are doing. Who would have thought that a campaign against young women dying from back-street abortions to escape the shame of illegitimacy would have led to newly formed embryos being regarded as disposable and babies only a few weeks away from an independent existence being killed because they were inconvenient? Who would have thought that a campaign to free women trapped in a loveless and abusive marriage would have led to an automatic assumption that sex was available on a first date and such sexual promiscuity that small-print diseases like syphilis have become a such plague that venereology has changed from a Cinderella specialty to one that attracts big brains and high salaries?

Although heard by only a few, this broadcast has awakened a sleeping giant. Middle class, middle-aged people across the country have found a voice and are surprised to find that many people share their view. Of course, there is a backlash. Thousands of young people have signed up on Facebook to the opinion that Brand and Ross are funny and should be defended. A generation war is in the offing.

At the heart of the matter is the BBC. To my generation the BBC was at the center of the Establishment. It was the voice of Authority. Affectionately known as Auntie, you could rely on it for honesty, impartiality, truth, and how to make a space-suit from two washing-up liquid containers and a few sheets of sticky-backed plastic. It may have seemed staid and a little behind fashion, but all the better for it. Others could push back boundaries; we could enjoy the Black and White Minstrels on the BBC.

The BBC has changed. Many regard it as the HQ of the Politically Correct. "Although only 7% of the British have dark-colored skin," they say, "BBC presenters on television represent the London norm which is nearer 40%. However, they all speak with an Oxford accent, except on radio where regional accents are mandatory in order to demonstrate ethnic diversity. Irish and Scottish accents are prominent."

They complain that the BBC favors homosexuality over heterosexuality, Islam over Christianity or Judaism, the European Union over America, Global Warming enthusiasts over sceptics, Palestine over Israel and Nu-Labor over the Conservatives.

There are whole websites given over to attacking the BBC. One constant complaint is that the TV license fee amounts to a tax that funds all this unpleasantness It is impossible to own a television without funding the BBC’s output. I’m not sure that I go along with this. Among license fee payers are people who enjoy Ross and Brand, people who enjoy ‘Eastenders’ or ‘The Antiques Roadshow’ or endless cookery and house redecorating or gardening or mindless breakfast shows. Others only watch football or dramatized Charles Dickens or News shows or Detective Dramas. We all have to pay for what we don’t like in order to watch what we do. If you don’t like TV you don’t have to watch anything or own a set. I think it is not that, that offends; it is the sense that offensive programming is going out ‘in my name’ that upsets people, just as the invasion of Iraq offended them. More than a million people marched in protest against the Iraq war. It was a minority, to be sure, and the minority must accept the will of the majority, but they can still feel offended that there support is assumed.

It will be interesting to see whether the Ross-Brand affair is just a storm in a teacup, or whether the protesters, now having wind in their sails, will affect a change in broadcasting policy.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's interesting to learn the the year of maximum birth in England was 1947; in the United States it was 10 years later, in 1957.

The 'leading edge' of the boomers is and always has been more conservative than the younger boomers. The sexual revolution, the drug revolution and changing roles for women all came after we early-borns were out of school and into the workplace.

It's a shame that the BBC has mirrored the liberals elsewhere in the world. The siren song of socialism and communism is not dead, but flourishing in foundations, in the news room, and in academia.

Just look at the US and the mania for the socialist Barak Obama. He has famously said that he wants to 'spread the wealth around', meaning that those that pay no taxes, those who are idle, will be given more, while those who work will do less.

How socialists think the well-to-do will stay in the face of ever higher taxes, and not move their operations overseas, is beyond me. These 'evil corporations' will then be taxed higher and higher, until they depart the shores forever.

The socialists won't be happy until they run everything through government; everything will work better, don't you know, when 'scientific' central planning

Adam Deen said...

more on this issue

http://adamdeen.blogspot.com/2008/11/x.html

Anonymous said...

Very interesting article. In Philadelphia we had our own very minor uproar over the use of an explective at the celebration ceremony for the Phillies win in the World Series. The consensus opinion was that this language is ubiquitous and therefore no longer offensive to the majority. But for me, the minute he uttered that expletive, my enjoyment of the festivities was dampened.

It is, unfortunately, not just a matter of tuning out or turning off the ever more prevelant offensive content of popular culture. The problem is, as my father said many years ago, "if you live in a sewer, you're going to smell." As the vulgar becomes ever more pervasive throughout society, we are all brought down.

Anonymous said...

At age 60 I really enjoy Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. Everyone who watches Brand knows what he is, and at heart he really is a gentleman.

Jonathan Ross is bright and funny. Sometimes he gets a little carried away and goes a bit overboard, like when he interviewed David Cameron.

Russell Brand was having sex with his grandaughter. Big deal.

Your comment about attacking defenseless old men certainly did hit a nerve though.

ms said...

Terry,

A general question: have you come across any research into low-dose therapy for CLL? Since CLL is a chronic disease, why not a little chemo over time rather than a whole lot at once?

Also, since I'm walrus-necked from CLL, why not a little prednisone every day rather than a whole lot during treatment with Rituxan? Five days of Prednisone pills prior to treatment with Rituxan took my neck from 18 1/2 inches to a svelte 17.

Mark

Terry Hamblin said...

The use of continuous chlorambucil was very popular 30 years ago and it works very well. Low dose prednisolone is helpful in some patients but others quickly become resistant.

ms said...

Terry,

Would low-dose prednisolone, if it were effective for me, undermine the use of higher-dose prednisolone if I need Rituxan again to control AIHA?

And would low-dose chlorambucil jeopardize the effectiveness of PCR at a later date? (I'm being treated at Sloan Kettering.)

Mark

Terry Hamblin said...

Low dose pred would not affect your response to high dose pred for AIHA. PCR appears no different from FCR in the latest ASH abstract. Second line PCR is not as effective as first line, so in that sense chlorambucil counts as a round of chemotherapy.

ms said...

Would low dose PCR or PC be a treatment possibility? The allopathic medical model uses the highest dosage patients can tolerate (kill everything as quickly as possible before the enemy can respond).

Is there some science behind the idea of gentle dosing and thinning the herd without the herd knowing what's going on? CLL is after all a chronic disease and even the most powerful weapons fail to eradicate everything.

Terry Hamblin said...

There is no evidence for low dose penatastatin being useful.

ms said...

Is there anything low dose that would tackle bulky CLL?

I've got a neck like a walrus, a giant spleen and nodes popping out of everywhere.

Terry Hamblin said...

Not really. Generally bulky disease needs full dose treatment.