Thursday 30 October 2008

Brand of intolerance

What a load of nonsense this whole thing with Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand is. Okay, they were being stupid, okay they shouldn't have left the daft messages on the answering machine, okay their egos may have got the better of them but is it worth all this uproar? Are they solely the ones to blame? They are both always well known for their mouthing off after all. Ross on his talk show forever making his interviewees squirm on that uncomfortable looking sofa of his and as for Brand, well, don't we all know by now what to expect from the ex drug addict, comedic nutter now? Generally I'm not that much of a fan of Russell Brand's, but I do know what happened and as far as I can tell he just pushed a joke too far, as he usually does and got caught up in the moment of supposed hilarity and garbage talking. Nothing he isn't used to, and nothing the rest of us are not used to with him. Same with Ross. Yes, they did go too far in leaving messages on, lets not forget, a comedy actor's, answering machine but they apologised and sent flowers privately soon after, before it was all picked up by the press. The mass media and press have led a witch hunt for the two of them as soon as they've all got wind of it and as usual blown it out of all proportion. It just seems that as soon as an opportunity arises to attack the good old BBC the commercial news channels and newspapers go wild with it. Losing his one or two nights on Radio 2 is no big deal to Brand. He resigned because he doesn't need the hassle not because of any guilt trip. He's never off Channel 4 and is now in pretty successful Hollywood movies for gawds sake. He doesn't even need the radio 2 gig. Ross, of course, is in a different position in that his BBC work is his life but if they were to sack him he would easily get work elsewhere and immediately pull the viewers in for some other channel. The buck should stop with the editors and producers who passed the programme in the first place. Did they not sense that the joke had went too far and needed a little tweeking on the editing table? The news report yesterday showed a crowd of protestors outside the BBC moaning, not one of them under sixty. That kind of says it all as far as I'm concerned.

3 comments:

Miriam Vaswani said...

Ok, Reid, I've responded to your response to my response to all this malarky on my blog, and I'm getting a bit dizzy...

Yep, anyway. I do agree that the producers should get a more severe kicking than these two ASBO's, but Brand and Ross aren't children. Brand should know better than to reveal details such as these, particularly to the woman's fecking grandfather, comedy actor or not.

It's just basic courtesy. If it was fictional, it would be daft and tasteless. But it's not fictional, it's a real person who presumably consented to sex but not to having the details shared in such a way.

Michael Reid said...

Yeah, whatever. It's a witch hunt. Typical of Halloween!

Miriam Vaswani said...

Hmm...I WAS planning to dress as a witch for Halloween...