I wish Sky News and other commentators would stop calling what Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand did on October 18 a prank.
A prank can be defined as a ludicrous or grotesque act done for fun and amusement. Their phone calls to Andrew Sachs were certainly ludicrous and grotesque but where is the fun and amusement in harassing an old man? It was an attack and the police should have acted.
Brand has gone, Ross is going to be tending his garden until January and the Controller of Radio 2, who did absolutely nothing about Sachs’s initial complaint, has also headed for the exit.
Now inquiries by the BBC and Ofcom will take weeks to decide what we all know already. Both presenters will be banned from the BBC for a couple of years and it must never happen again.
Russell Brand’s televised apology did not do it for me. Claiming he got caught up in the moment and that he respected Andrew Sachs, he adopted an apparently serious yet strangely hollow tone. Why, if it was indeed as he suggests just a moment of madness, did he a week after the offending broadcast chant a pathetic and unconvincing mantra including the word sorry but, spitefully, added that his original abusive attack and filthy lies were funny?
In his world, a moment of madness can maybe last a week? As an apology, his self-recorded grovelling which made no reference to his later claim that his attack on Sachs was funny did, I believe, tinge the gangly entertainer with hypocrisy. He seemed willing to say anything to save his own skin while unable to hide his own cruelty.
Now there is growing speculation that the contract with Hot Sauce, Jonathan Ross’s production company, will mean a huge payout from the BBC if his services are dispensed with. Has the BBC not put a clause in the contract ensuring the licence-payer is protected if the artist has to be got rid off for falling below acceptable standards? And if not, why not?
To fail to do that would be a monumental failure. If Hot Sauce would not have signed up to that, the public broadcaster should have walked away as the interests of the public would not be protected. That would also have left the unsavoury innuendo, the vitriolic personal attacks and the alleged humour unworthy of even schoolboys to the perhaps more-astute lawyers to be found in the private sector.
Jonathan Ross is going to fight to keep his job. Not having the decency to resign, it is obvious he feels he can turn it around. No chance. As he does not have enough honour to fall on his sword, the BBC has correctly suspended him. Twelve weeks is too long even though he will lose out by about £1.5 million in that time.
If Ross is reinstated on the same terms and rate, many licence fee payers will refuse to renew their TV licence and actively protest that decision. The country will make the Beeb see sense and Four Poofs and A Piano will be looking for another gig.
It is preposterous to think some people still want Brand and Ross to get off scot-free because Nic Philps, a wet-behind-the-ears producer, is said to have approved the offensive pre-recorded package and referred it up the chain of command. He is also claimed to have reported that Sachs only wanted it toned down which Philps then, apparently, failed to do.
The staff involvement is only a side issue. Did the gruesome twosome harrass Sachs or not? Did they do it while paid by the BBC to make a broadcastable programme? Did they use BBC facilities to perpetrate the attacks?
Philps, if he is found to have acted so wrongly, should be out the door with Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas who firstly threatened to quit if any of her dear staff are axed, then just resigned anyway.
Apparatchik Rod Mackenzie from Inverness is the one on the left
Ms Douglas, you should take action on any complaint, if you get one. Just make sure you keep a tighter rein in your next job, again, if you get one.
The inevitable apologists have been wheeled out led by the trendy yoof wing of the corporation. Rod Mackenzie, the editor of Radio 1’s Newsbeat, is claiming most of their listeners reckon it is a storm in a teacup. What were they all asked? I thought the unemployed Asbo collectors that make up the main audience of that mind-numbing station cannot communicate with anything other than a grunt anyway.
If Rod Mackenzie, being an Inverness man who therefore should know better, is being used by BBC staff worried about losing their seat on the gravy train, he too should be heading back up the M1 motorway very soon if he has a conscience. They are always looking for people at Inverness hospital radio. It would be far more worthwile and he would sleep better at night.
Otherwise, the unthinking apparatchik could always let me have his own mobile phone number and the names and ages of his young female relations. I could then call him up one evening to make filthy suggestions about what I have done to them. See how you like it, Mackenzie.
But Selina, who famously came over to film Prince Charles with Splash and Gloria MacKillop on Berneray, wanted that job and is jolly well going to fight them. She says she is going to sue Five News for giving it to a wee lassie who, not that long ago, worked for this very newspaper. Gorgeous pouting young thing Isla Traquair got the stand-in news job while the regular newsreader, £1million-a-year stunner Natasha Kaplinsky, went off to have her baby boy.
