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.
Astonishment has been expressed that this issue could have
blown up to such a degree at a time of financial meltdown and one of the worst
ever crises of capitalism. The Ross/Brand scenario has caused a furore
precisely because working people, credit crunch and recession aside, know –
even if unconsciously – that capitalism threatens all human decency and human
morality.
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.
To the Stocks with Them!
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.
