The BBC is a DAMAGED BRAND

My thousands of regular readers will know only too well that I do not hold with pranks, hoaxes, practical jokes, impersonations, nuisance phone calls or any other variety of supposed jape. Accordingly, it will not bring the edifice crashing to the ground if I do not rush to defend the BBC in its handling of what will perhaps become known as the Answergate Scandal.

For those lucky enough to have had this particular – and particularly unattractive – episode pass them by (my many readers overseas, for instance), let me swiftly recap. Russell Brand, who is of course the son of comedienne Jo Brand, is a farouche and hirsute comic who has had fairly mystifying success in Britain during the last couple of years but has yet to convince audiences across the Atlantic of his appeal. Before we rush to congratulate them on their good taste, let us remind ourselves that Americans do laugh at Jerry Lewis, Rodney Dangerfield and Martin Lawrence.

Among his other duties in Britain, Brand hosts a Saturday peak-time programme on Radio 2, once the cosiest of the BBC’s wireless channels but latterly aimed at younger audiences. I have never felt it incumbent upon me to listen to this programme and severe readers may think this a laxity on my part. How may I presume to draw inferences upon a broadcast that I have never experienced? Such a shortcoming has not inhibited thousands of others from expressing forthright views, of course, on this or any other work of art or entertainment. In this case, however, rough video footage of the edition in question – perhaps taken on a mobile phone – has now been broadcast on dozens of television news bulletins so that even those not predisposed to make a judgment will at least have formed a strong impression.

Brand’s in-studio guest was the highly-paid BBC presenter Jonathan Ross. Telephone conversations are evidently part of the programme’s style and Brand attempted to contact the actor Andrew Sachs who, as every news bulletin has been at pains to point out, is 78. Whether this contact was pre-agreed or not has been disputed. At any rate, Sachs’ answerphone machine kicked in. Brand reckons to have a connection with Sachs in that he had enjoyed a relationship with the actor’s dancer granddaughter, Georgina Baillie. Brand and Ross talked into and across the mouthpiece of the phone, so that their remarks would be picked up by Sachs’ answering machine. At one point, Ross shouted “He fucked your granddaughter”. The pair then speculated as to whether this intelligence would drive Sachs to commit suicide.

A week later, The Mail on Sunday ran a story about the broadcast and Sachs let it be known that, not surprisingly, he had found the recording he discovered on his machine very offensive. Ms Baillie later gave it as her opinion that both Brand and Ross should be sacked by the BBC. By this time, the story was the lead in newspapers and broadcast bulletins. Much was made of the fact that, contrary to what is widely expected of most talk radio, The Russell Brand Show is not broadcast live. Consequently, producers and editors had two days to consider whether anything recorded was not suitable for broadcasting. It seems that the remark I quoted from Ross above was actually broadcast (a language warning is carried at the top of the show) and it would of course have been preserved on Sachs’ answerphone. The listening millions merely heard an expletive; the butt of the prank heard an expletive that attached to the person of his granddaughter.

It is not news that Brand’s programme is pre-recorded. Two and a half years ago, when the programme was carried by Radio 6, there was a fuss when it was discovered that a supposed competition based on text messaging had been faked and the prize awarded to a BBC staff member. The competition could only have been executed in a live programme and it was the revelation that it was not live that exposed the fake. So many broadcast scams were being exposed at that time, however, that the Brand version was doubtless considered small beer.

By lunchtime today, the BBC had by its own admission received some 18,000 complaints against Brand and Ross, an astonishing number. People clearly feel very empathetic towards somebody whose domestic space has been invaded and whose relative, not a public figure, traduced. Brand and Ross have been suspended pending an internal inquiry. As one who was dismissed from the BBC thirty years ago for “talking to the press without prior written consent” (a technicality which you might think – and you would be right – is breached daily with impunity), I cannot but feel that dismissal is justified here. Ross in particular looks culpable. The pair have been supported by a predominantly young listenership who reckon to think this is all a fuss about nothing but Ross is no youngster. At rising 48 he is of his apologists’ parents' generation. He is plenty old enough to understand what the parameters are and to recognize when adolescent behaviour looks merely pathetic in a middle-aged man.

But a lot of blame attaches to the BBC too. Who was sleeping on their watch when the recording was passed for broadcast? Why did it take so long for the Corporation to get to grips with this matter? It inevitably looks as though they were waiting to see how far they had “got away with it”, rather than confronting their expensive stars immediately and as a matter of course. And the supposed artistic defence about “cutting edge” humorists who “push the boundaries” looks pathetic when raised to support mere po-willy-bum juvenilia. Brand told journalists he thought the whole matter was “funny”. He is a person who has been given a free ride in a complaisant climate and it really is time that he got a wake-up call.

As for questions in the house and first Cameron, then Brown feeling that they need to deliver themselves of an opinion, I am simply aghast. As Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells might cry: “Has the celebrity culture gone mad?”

P.S: Seconds after I posted this, it was announced that Russell Brand had resigned from presenting his Radio 2 programme.