For the past week the British press has been dominated by the story of two comics, a grandfather and an answerphone. Blandrossgate has proven to be the scandal of 2008, a full scale media storm still raging, embarrassing Brand and threatening Ross’s BBC career. Although UK readers will be familiar with, and indeed most likely sick of, the story by now, The QuFF shall elaborate for our international readers, most of whom would have wasted their week reading about events in the Congo and Syria.
Two comedians, Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, left a series of increasingly controversial messages on the answerphone of the popular comic actor Andrew Sachs, 70, during Brand’s BBC radio show. Mr Sachs is most famous for his role as ‘Manuel’, the Spanish waiter in John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers. The messages related to Brand’s having slept with Sach’s granddaughter, each successive telephone call becoming more vulgar and explicit, with Ross occasionally interjecting “He’s f***ed your granddaughter!”. The telephone calls were later broadcast despite Mr Sach’s insistence that they should not be.
Brand has subsequently quit the show and Ross has been suspended without pay for three months as the media frenzy builds. The BBC licence fee is under government review, the Conservative Party are proposing a streamlined corporation; it is perhaps the most damaging event in Auntie’s recent history. The people are questioning whether the BBC is providing value for money and fulfilling its public remit. Elements of Murdoch’s press are calling for the abolition of the state broadcaster and the heads of Ross and Brand. The QuFF, however, marches to the beat of a different drum.
It is the opinion of this newspaper that Messrs Brand and Ross are the victims of a campaign so vitriolic and illiberal in nature as to shame any free society. After all, all they did was to publically humiliate a young woman, bait her grandfather on national radio and attempt to extract humour from their pain. Schadenfreude is perhaps the greatest comic tool of the modern era and this episode is merely another step towards furthering the boundaries of comic endeavour. The two most popular British comedies of recent times- The Catherine Tate Show and Little Britain- are expert in identifying members of society unable to command a riposte and picking them apart mercilessly.
It is common knowledge that all jokes that can be written have been written. The Duke of Kent is said to have mumbled the last new joke in 2002* and since then comedians, in order to survive, have had to siphon diesel from the metaphorical petrol tank of ‘edginess’. When seen in this light what Brand and Ross did was not in fact a mean spirited prank by two ageing men finally exposed as talentless shock-prostitutes without an ounce of wit between them, but in actual fact a trail-blazing, valiant attempt to save British comedy from extinction. It is pertinent to remember that humour is down thirteen percent in the last year alone causing some scientists to link the chief cause of laughter with bumble bees. They are rather funny.
Some people have drawn a parallel between this episode and the public outcry against Chris Morris and Channel 4 for the infamous broadcast of the bitingly satirical Brass-Eye Special in 2001. That comparison is not very good.
This former hyper-quadro-broadsheet also considers the calls for trimming the BBC farfetched and extreme. After all, who can truly argue that shows such as ‘Dog Borstal’ and ‘Snog Marry Avoid’ do not meet the BBC pledge to ‘inform, educate & entertain’? It is also important to consider the BBC’s commitment to catering for audiences of all ages, young and old. They have gone to great lengths to target the youth audience and should be applauded for doing so. Indeed, these middle-aged men running the corporation have proved themselves time and again to have had their finger on the pulse of youth culture, and their conclusion that all those under the age of twenty-five in Britain are mentally deficient glue sniffers who want to watch programs called “Can Fat Teens Hunt?” is both accurate and fair. Furthermore they are correct in deducing that the current generation of young adults are just too stupid to be in any way interested in or informed about the world, as “knowingness of things is unhip, boyakasha, brap and kiss my chuddies…” as the fifty-one year old presenters of Radio One, in no way like the creepy, strangely old people at teenage parties, often say. After all, the only teenagers lying in the gutters and looking up at the stars in Britain today are binge drinkers and drug peoples. The Daily Express said so, so there.
There are some who feel that what Brand and Ross did just isn’t funny. Indeed, there are those who see Brand and Ross themselves as painfully unfunny. To utter such mouth-incorrectnesses though is, although forgivable, to miss the point. They are not funny in a conventional sense. The BBC has branded their humour as ‘edgy’ and catering to ‘different’ tastes. Quite evidently, then, nobody got Brand’s infamous ‘dressing up as Osama Bin Laden less than twenty-four hours after 9/11’ jape. Therein lay the lapse- not in Brand’s judgement, but in people’s tastes. Just because nobody saw these telephone calls as funny does not mean that they weren’t. It just means that the youth of today just aren’t in touch with themselves, that is all.
The consequence of this lapse in public taste is that two pioneers of wit are left with their careers temporarily besmirched. It is all well and good that people have taken time to spare a thought for Andrew Sachs and his family, but has anybody considered Mr Brand and Mr Ross in all of this? Brand has had to surrender his radio show, leaving him with only television, publishing and stand-up engagements to occupy his time. He must be wondering where it all went wrong as he reluctantly fields bothersome telephone calls from tabloid editors offering him annoyingly heavy piles of cash for the exclusive rights to his side of such a long and boring story. Why, he must be wondering, does nobody find hoax calls to the emergency services funny? Russell, a prophet is never welcome in his own kingdom, remember that. You are ahead of your time. And as for Ross, labelled cruelly by some as “…a parasite sucking upon the public purse”, his fine of £1.4m pounds will leave him with a mere £16.6m on his contract. And during the credit crunch too.
Whilst people watch and jeer as all that is contemporary British comedy is torn to pieces and unravelled before their eyes, as the BBC flounders and struggles to maintain the public licence fee and the political vultures circle, The QuFF is moved to ask; who breaks mosquitoes on a wheel?
“Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne’er tastes, and beauty ne’r enjoys”
Alexander Pope, 1735
*”Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Doorbell Salesman
Doorbell salesman who?
No, you’re not supposed to say that bit, that was the joke…”
Wordifying: Fluffer, The QuFFer-In-Chief
©The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman 2008
