The Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand affair – the scab picked off the wound

By Pam Woods

The BBC has suspended presenters Ross and Brand following lewd messages left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone, broadcast on a BBC 2 radio programme, regarding Brand’s alleged sexual encounter with the 78-year-old actor’s granddaughter,.  The corporation has received an unprecedented number of complaints - over 12,000 so far. Gordon Brown has chosen to wade into the debate, calling for better standards within the BBC. It is possible the producer’s head will roll, along, maybe, with those of one or two other BBC minions.

Postings on internet blogs have cynically made the point that Sachs, a third-rate actor, would relish and enjoy being in the limelight. But this is not about Sachs. Nor is it about his granddaughter, Georgina, who has obligingly provided photographs and given interviews that portray her as a sexually attractive young woman. How could she possibly be expected to present herself otherwise? As the grandmother of two teenage girls, I am fully aware of the pressures that the clothing and cosmetics industries, through mass advertising, bring to bear on girls and young women. Teenage girls routinely, but inadvertently, adopt facial expressions and body language that belong on the pages of porn magazines. And the bourgeois media have brought ‘soft’ pornography out of the shadows and into the mainstream.

Georgina will undoubtedly make a few bucks out of this sleazy affair and that is, in a sense, precisely the point. ‘Celebrity’ – that is being famous just for being famous, is a crude reflection of capitalism. After all bankers made ‘money,’ as we now know, that was also fictitious.           

The bourgeois media, and TV in particular, appear to know no bounds, no depths that can’t be plummeted. You have a young daughter suffering an ‘eating disorder’ (and that is a discussion in and of itself) Put her on the telly! .A family of kids with dwarf syndrome living in a poor part of India. Great telly!  And there appears to be no-one who will not humiliate themselves for five minutes of fame. I know for a fact that the latter is complete fallacy. I work in a part of London, Islington, where film crews regularly trawl the streets looking for people who might be prepared to give their opinions on this or that issue. For every person they manage to coerce into being ‘on the telly’ there are usually around a hundred who tell them to go forth and multiply.

For workers, who can afford to go out to socialise only rarely, television is one of our main sources of entertainment. It is disgusting that £18m of our licence fees go to pay the wages of a sleazy, supercilious idiot such as Jonathan Ross. NUJ members working at the BBC on poor wages will also be hoping he gets the sack, I guess.

By Ian Aylett

The acres and hours of media coverage given to the Jonathon Ross/Russell Brand saga at first sight simply beggar belief. In the midst of global economic crisis, hundreds of thousands of people dying in the Congo and a US presidential election which is supposed to make a difference to the world, the British media obsesses about such crap.

Given that this episode and others like it get so much prominence and become topics of conversation is there anything useful socialists can say about them? Are they just flotsam, temporary dust swirls in the media highway which dissipate without effect? Is there any discernible underlying logic beyond the ephemeral concatenation of arbitrary accidents? Surely they are interesting questions socialists can consider in idle moments.

The sequence of events itself is quite informative. It seems that only two people who actually listened to the programme complained at the time. The furore only took off when the Daily Mail kindly drew its readers’ attention to the offending item.

A section of the failing ‘news’papers make money out of stirring up their readers with scandals and ‘campaigns’. Rarely for progressive causes of course. From the Sun’s outing of paedophiles to one campaign I swear I remember urging readers to report ‘benefit cheats’ they are invariably based on fear, prejudice, or ‘defence’ of some cherished aspect of ‘our way of life’.

In this case I don’t believe there was a genuine public outcry. The number of complaints to the BBC got to over 30,000. (Did they all subsequently watch it on YouTube!) It’s a lot by normal programme standards but not when you consider the massive subsequent publicity. 

That was the trigger for the crisis at the BBC, which then became the story. And here I suspect we have the real underlying issue.

Within the private sector media and conservative opinion there is a rabid hatred of public service broadcasting and the licence fee. There is real rage that after all the privatisation and deregulation the BBC and NHS are still in the public sector. On the one hand they ‘distort’ competition, i.e. deny profits to the private sector. And on the other, their survival, damaged but not destroyed, is a standing reproach to the triumphalism of free market ideology.

The Tories have given up direct attacks on the NHS because they know it is a vote loser. Even Thatcher tried to convince us that the NHS was safe in her hands. Sic. But they and big business take every opportunity to undermine public support for the BBC. They say they will support public service broadcasting but they mean a US Public Broadcasting Service style poverty-stricken skeleton on starvation rations and charitable donations.