Confessions of a randy dandy (Russell Brand features)

[nekokate]

Seshme, I have no doubt that he has had sex with her. I'd put money on it. Hell, I'd have sex with her!

The more I think about this the more I am truly amazed that the media have decided to make something of this particular story. I have heard every single Russell Brand show since he started with Karl Pilkington on BBC 6 Music, all through the classic stuff with Matt Morgan and Trevor Lock, up to the recent guest co-host stuff on BBC Radio 2 with Noel Gallagher, Noel Fielding and Simon Amstel, and Russell is ALWAYS like this. It's nothing new. The Daily fucking Mail have had literally years to opine about how "disgraceful" he is, yet apparently they've only just got around to it!

He did an interview with Chrissie Hynde where he was similarly inappropriate and mentioned he'd shagged her daughter - Daily Mail response: Nothing.

He left rude and laddish messages on Duncan Bannatyne's answerphone over the radio - Daily Mail response: Nothing.

He left ENORMOUSLY inappropriate messages on Dita Von Teese's answerphone live on radio - Daily Mail response: Nothing.

He interviewed the news anchor, Huw Edwards, and pretended to want him to bum him and treat him like a little girl - Daily Mail response: Nothing

He asked the guy who did the voice of Zippy from the kids show Rainbow if Zippy was secretly gay and bumming that hippo fella, and how big the puppet's cock was.

I could go on!! Haha!

Hypocritical and ignorant wankers to make such a big deal out of this one incident. I didn't find the Sachs messages funny and I remember thinking at the time that it was in poor taste, but with the scapegoat witch-hunt this is turning into I have no choice but to side with Russell.

I fink ee dun rong, but this is the equivalent of calling for someone's beheading for running a stop sign.

[luke]

[seshme]

The Mail using it to sell papers is no surprise it's got the Manuel angle, the excuse to tut whilst printing rude pictures all the usual shit.

What I object to are the politicians. The Tory prick on Radio 5 was comparing it to the Kelly case and calling for the DG of the BBC to resign for residing over a culture of 'vulgarity'. Best quote was 'I don't care if programs like Little Britain are popular, hard core pornography is popular.'

I took that as a call for porn on the BBC and support him in that.

Of course 95% chance after preaching to the plebs he went to his flat in Chelsea(which we all pay for) and got his secretary to insert various root vegetables into him.

[faceless]

I just heard on the radio that Russell and Jonathan Ross have been suspended by the BBC. Apparently they'll be having a letter sent home to their parents too.

[seshme]

The world has gone completely mad.

They won't be happy until we have the equivalent of the US FCC here.

[seshme]

[luke]

i've just heard on the radio that brand is going to resign!

[faceless]

haha, I just heard that too - good for him.

I'm sure the only loser here will be the BBC, but there will be thousands of ratty little moralistic fucknuggets celebrating that they got their way.

[nekokate]

He could have his pick of non-BBC radio stations to get a show on. That is if he chooses to carry on with the shows. I'll make a seond prediction - he's no longer interested in weekly radio work.

[luke]

apparently the bbc received over 18000 complaints! strange the things people get worked up over

the only outcome i was hoping for out of all this is the bbc would loose their license fee! i think thats where all the furore comes from, them using the license fee to pay for this kinda thing - if they'd done the same thing on a commercial station i bet there would still be just the original 2 complaints

brands got his new show on soon anyway hasn't he?

[seshme]

If there is no license fee then we'll get US style TV.

Have you ever watched network TV in the US?

We'll get radio that is all like Talk Radio and Virgin.

We'll get comedy that is all like ITV comedy.

This whole thing has much more to do with people envious of Ross money and media competitors to the BBC stirring it up.

There were 2 complaints plus 18000 Daily Mail readers.

[nekokate]

Russ has been offered a new radio contract on NME radio by its managing director, Sammy Jacob.

According to fans he met at the aftershow of a recent gig he's also personally (and strictly off the record, I have to assume) reassured them "I'll be back on the radio in no time".

[faceless]

Russell Brand v Thomas Hobbes: no wonder the BBC is floundering
At least the 17th-century philosopher had some editorial guidelines for 'edgy' comedy
Ian Jack
The Guardian,
Saturday November 1 2008

It would be wrong to imagine that Radio 2 broadcast the Russell Brand show of October 18 unedited. This Thursday, the ever diligent Daily Mail published a section that had been cut (although some podcasts subscribers may have heard it). Brand and his guest Jonathan Ross are discussing ways to appease character actor Andrew Sachs, on whose answerphone they have just left offensive messages. "M********e him to say sorry," says Ross towards the end (the asterisks are the Daily Mail's). "Make him feel better." (Bursts out laughing.) Brand replies, "So sorry, Andrew Sachs, this will make up for it. Go on finish it, into the palm of my hand. Good girl for uncle daddy, good girl for uncle daddy." (Laughs.)

This might be called a Hobbesian example of humour; the 17th-century philosopher declared that laughter was one of mankind's worst attributes because it boosted self-esteem at the expense of the less fortunate, in lives that were generally nasty, brutish and short. It was a narrow view, later denied by all kinds of sunny humorists from PG Wodehouse to Ken Dodd via Arthur Askey, but the "edgy" comedy to which the BBC is so tremblingly devoted thrives on it.

No mention of Hobbes in the BBC's editorial guidelines, however. They are intensely practical documents, up to a point. Before the 9pm watershed, the most offensive language (cunt, motherfucker and fuck) is banned. Post-watershed, "careful judgments" are required and the most offensive language must be approved by "a senior editorial figure or [for independent productions] by the commissioning editor and the relevant output controller". In these terms, the only problematic thing about the Brand show was Ross's message to Sachs: "He fucked your granddaughter!"

No specific editorial guideline, so far as I can tell, covers the possibility of two BBC comedians devising entertainment by broadcasting their lewd messages to an unsuspecting member of the public, other than the general words of the introduction that commit the BBC to "the highest ethical standards" and the need to balance the right to freedom of expression "with the responsibility to respect privacy and protect children".

Spare a thought for the producer and compliance officer at this point. They've cut what they see as the worst bit: the image of Brand masturbating Sachs. Perhaps the highest ethical standards and the need to respect privacy have been met. In any case, what do these phrases mean? Expressed in comparative salaries, Ross is worth 100 times more to the BBC than his producers, and precedent would suggest to them that ethical standards could in his case be applied flexibly. In 2006, he asked David Cameron about his boyhood sexuality: "Did you or did you not have a wank thinking 'Margaret Thatcher?'" If ever a question called for a repeat of the John Nott moment - politician throws down his mike and exits - this was it. But Cameron sat smiling, too bemused to reply.

The pattern, though not the volume, of complaints was similar to the Brand case. Only seven were received by the BBC after the broadcast, swelling to about 360 after news reports of the interview. Ofcom got a few hundred more and investigated whether there had been a breach of its code. No, was the answer. Ross had "a well-established presenting style which is deliberately provocative" and Cameron was a senior politician used to handling the media. Moreover, neither he nor Baroness Thatcher had protested. The Ofcom report noted that in a later BBC interview Cameron had said he would happily appear on the Ross show again - it was watched by millions of people. "I don't agree with all the questions he asks, but my point is to go on the programme and put my point across," he said.

What was at work here was fear of the demographic. For Cameron, that he might shut himself off from potential voters; for the BBC, that it might lose a section of its audience. The ethical standards of Britain at large, whatever they may be, didn't come into it. What mattered was offence to particular subjects, Thatcher and Cameron, and a particular audience, that for Jonathan Ross. A similar case could be made for the Brand show. The offence may have been greater and Sachs may have complained and the BBC's director general may call it "utterly unacceptable ... a very, very serious failure of judgment", but very few (five in all) of the people who actually listened to Russell Brand found it deplorable. A common sentiment online is that it was only two guys having a laugh - comedy demanding, as Henri Bergson said in his seminal work on laughter (though it gets no blogging mention), "something like a momentary anaesthesia of the heart".

Assuming Brand's audience knows what they are, can ethical standards be divided by generation? I grew up when the most daring comedy in British broadcasting was The Goon Show, which operated under the proscriptions of the BBC variety programme policy guide for writers and producers, devised in 1948 and unrevised until the 1960s. No ambiguity about the highest ethical standards here. The guide placed an "absolute ban" on jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men and immorality of any kind. Suggestive references were outlawed to, quoting exactly, "honeymoon couples, chambermaids, fig leaves, prostitution, ladies' underwear eg winter draws on, animal habits eg rabbits, commercial travellers." There could be no personal abuse (however it was construed) towards government ministers, party leaders or MPs.

All that changed with the first edition of That Was the Week That Was in October, 1962. Ted Heath said later that the programme marked the end of deference. What I remember was the enthralment of late Saturday nights, when the BBC, previously a teacher or a preacher, reached down to reflect and stimulate a growing scepticism towards previously untouchable institutions: the church, what remained of the empire, a Tory government on its last legs. None of this was easily accomplished. The then director general, Hugh Greene, faced political lobbying and barrages of viewers' protests, so much so that he grew weary of vetting each week's script in detail and eventually cancelled TW3.

A liberal history of the 20th century might describe Greene's decision as a blow against social progress and a victory, if only a temporary one, for the establishment. But there were other concerns that would find an echo in today's BBC. Donald Baverstock, controller of television, complained that while TW3's writers were so robustly attacking other people's behaviour and beliefs, they had only "muddled standards and cheapjack values". As Peter Cook remarked to his fellow satirist, Christopher Booker, "Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea."

Out of the militant ironies of satire came stand-up and its associated forms of reckless performing, elevated to an importance in Britain as nowhere else as both entertainment and social criticism. Mark Thompson and other BBC voices this week talked as though comedy had always depended on its "edginess" for its creativity; the days of Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and Dad's Army might never have been. That view is as narrow as Hobbes's. Worse, at least for the future of the world's greatest public-funded broadcaster, is that edginess depends on the continual finding of new edges, breaking taboos and conventions that comprise ethical standards, which, however much they vary between generations, most of us hope will always be there.

The BBC can have one or the other; it has been greedy and desperate of it to try to have both.

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A very good article - I didn't realise that there was other stuff that had actually been cut...

[nekokate]

I didn't even know the wanking him off "good girl for uncle daddy" bit was missing. I heard it at the time, so I assumed it was on the podcast, too.

[faceless]

ahh, I thought they meant it had been edited out of the original broadcast, which would have made the producer's gaffe even more significant.