Settled Dust?

Now the Brand/Ross brouhaha is calming down and Mr Brand has departed the Beeb and Mr Ross is in detention it's time to re-visit to try to work out just what the hell happened. As far as I can gather the show itself only garnered two quite mild complaints. It was the Mail what done it! After an article appeared in the Mail on Sunday a positive a positive tsunami of complaints welled up and consumed the message boards, blogs, emails, listeners forums etc. My own small contribution was just one such. So how to explain this swell of righteous indignation. My assumption is that, like me, many people have been turning away from the Brand/Ross axis of 'humour' largely put off by the presenters' own tendency to go way over the top. As far a Russell Brand is concerned I never listened to him much anyway not because I dislike his stuff but because he was just on at the wrong time and time-shifting by podcast is not yet in my lexicon of available options. Anytime I did listen to him I found him zanily entertaining and only mildly offensive never enough to raise a protest or to switch off. Jonathan Ross on the other hand overstepped the mark so often and with such puerile innuendo that I made a positive decision not to watch or listen to him again but like, I suspect, many others I didn't protest just voted with my off switch. It now appears that there were quite a few of us because the woodwork yielded the tidal wave of approbation that was visited on the BBC post-Sachs. So the Andrew Sachs affair was just the catalyst that released the pent up torrent of dissatisfaction with JRs childishly smutty technique. Sadly Russell Brand and Lesley Duncan have born the brunt of the listening public's disapproval and Mr Ross seems to have suffered a mild wrist slap. Personally I would have reversed the penalties but that's not the world we live in. Jonathan Ross is the senior presenter, is probably paid more, I suspect is more intelligent, knows better, and is much much older. He should know better. He is undoubtedly clever and, I believe, doesn't need to descend to the levels which he has plumbed so regularly.

Enough about the main protagonists and on to the BBC whose inability to have nipped this furore in the bud is simply staggering. Not to have a senior figure in place to be able to head this kind of outcry off at an early stage with the relevant apology and promises of rolling heads etc. etc. is extraordinary. Hopefully they'll learn some lessons from this and we wont see a repeat of this level of ineptitude from our public broadcaster again.