Ross & Brand possibly to face prosecution

[The Red Heifer]

This thread ended up pathetic. A lot of people need to take a look at themselves, and it isn't who everyone seems to think it is.

[Billybob Dylan]

Looks like I missed something.

My birthday thread for one.

[Diamond Dog]

I'm going to write a letter of compaint to the BCB Board, explaining that a rogue admin has completely overstepped their responsibilities and abrogated their duties to do as the majority of BCB wants, by moving this thread because they find it deeply boring.

I expect a shitstorm of national proportions and heads to roll.

[Diamond Dog]

Did somebody say something?

If they did, we know one admin that wouldn't be listening, Samantha dear.

[Insouciant Western People]

This thread ended up pathetic. A lot of people need to take a look at themselves, and it isn't who everyone seems to think it is.

Mysterious. I like that.

[JQW]

Getting back to the crux of the matter - i.e. that tosser's radio show a fortnight ago.

The BBC has strict regulations regarding swearing in radio broadcasts. Forms have to be submitted and approved by someone high up in the hierarchy, and the broadcast should only then be allowed if the use of swearing is deemed to be critical for the programme. In this case as Brand's show was an independent production, approval had to come from Radio 2's own controller, Ms. Douglas.

Now it seems that procedures were simply not followed, and that no approval was sought.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/radio-silence-at-the-bbc-984637.html

I hope from all this that some of Ms. Douglas's other appointments at both Radio 2 and 6 Music are called into question. She's made many changes to both station's schedules that are really not appropriate, and she appears to have had a preference for using 'stars' from one particular agency. Russell Brand simply shouldn't have been on Radio 2 in the first place, and there's others (notably George Lamb on 6 Music) whose tenure should now come into question. More important to myself, anyway, is that she's failed to offer any suitable replacement for the late Humph's Best Of Jazz.

[Oscar]

I've moved this thread, as it has gone deeply boring. May it stay so in perpetuity.

What gives you the right to move the thread?

It's traditional.

[JQW]

I heard a report on one of the news channels a day or two ago that George Lamb was being lined up as an interim replacement for Ross's Saturday show on Radio 2. Surely not!

I wonder if that decision was made prior to Lesley Douglas's departure? Anyway the Radio 2 schedule for next Saturday is currently blank for Ross's slot. Brand's show wouldn't have gone out next week anyway, due to the annual Festival of Remembrance from The Royal Albert Hall.

[Seymore Porn]

Getting back to the crux of the matter - i.e. that tosser's radio show a fortnight ago.

The BBC has strict regulations regarding swearing in radio broadcasts. Forms have to be submitted and approved by someone high up in the hierarchy, and the broadcast should only then be allowed if the use of swearing is deemed to be critical for the programme. In this case as Brand's show was an independent production, approval had to come from Radio 2's own controller, Ms. Douglas.

Now it seems that procedures were simply not followed, and that no approval was sought.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/radio-silence-at-the-bbc-984637.html

I hope from all this that some of Ms. Douglas's other appointments at both Radio 2 and 6 Music are called into question. She's made many changes to both station's schedules that are really not appropriate, and she appears to have had a preference for using 'stars' from one particular agency. Russell Brand simply shouldn't have been on Radio 2 in the first place, and there's others (notably George Lamb on 6 Music) whose tenure should now come into question. More important to myself, anyway, is that she's failed to offer any suitable replacement for the late Humph's Best Of Jazz.

You've got it in for her just because she's a woman. I hope you haven't made her cry.

[Diamond Dog]

Getting back to the crux of the matter - i.e. that tosser's radio show a fortnight ago.

The BBC has strict regulations regarding swearing in radio broadcasts. Forms have to be submitted and approved by someone high up in the hierarchy, and the broadcast should only then be allowed if the use of swearing is deemed to be critical for the programme. In this case as Brand's show was an independent production, approval had to come from Radio 2's own controller, Ms. Douglas.

Now it seems that procedures were simply not followed, and that no approval was sought.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/radio-silence-at-the-bbc-984637.html

I hope from all this that some of Ms. Douglas's other appointments at both Radio 2 and 6 Music are called into question. She's made many changes to both station's schedules that are really not appropriate, and she appears to have had a preference for using 'stars' from one particular agency. Russell Brand simply shouldn't have been on Radio 2 in the first place, and there's others (notably George Lamb on 6 Music) whose tenure should now come into question. More important to myself, anyway, is that she's failed to offer any suitable replacement for the late Humph's Best Of Jazz.

You've got it in for her just because she's a woman. I hope you haven't made her cry.

Oh, grow the fuck up.

[Spenny]

Oooooohh! I'm being ignored.

[K]

Oooooohh! I'm being ignored.

Hey, that's a good idea!

[the masked man]

There does seem to a split identity for 6 Music at present. It's really torn between the idea that it needs 'personality' presenters to appeal to Heat readers, and the original remit that it should be presented by music lovers, for music lovers. There are too many of the former (the execrable Lamb plus unfunny comedians like Stephen Merchant and John Richardson), but this counterbalanced by the likes of Steve Lamacq, Gideon Coe, Guy Garvey and the incomparable Marc Riley. So long as enough of the latter are employed, I'll still listen in.

But there are enough stations offering inane banter for the easily amused. Why can't us musos have one channel catering solely for our needs?

[JQW]

Interesting comment from Barbara Ellen of The Observer:

Indeed, by far the most surreal aspects of all this has been the absence of public support for Ross, certainly on blogs I've seen, for the first time calling into question his status as 'Britain's best-loved entertainer'. It's a shocking thought, on a par with 'Brucie can't dance!' but it is out there now. Manuelgate may one day be looked back on as a giant, unofficial vox pop on what the public really thought of Ross, not so much in terms of the Sachs hoo-ha, but the long-term disenchantment with his output.

Here's the full article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/02/ross-brand-censorship-comedy-bbc

[Spenny]

There does seem to a split identity for 6 Music at present. It's really torn between the idea that it needs 'personality' presenters to appeal to Heat readers, and the original remit that it should be presented by music lovers, for music lovers. There are too many of the former (the execrable Lamb plus unfunny comedians like Stephen Merchant and John Richardson), but this counterbalanced by the likes of Steve Lamacq, Gideon Coe, Guy Garvey and the incomparable Marc Riley. So long as enough of the latter are employed, I'll still listen in.

But there are enough stations offering inane banter for the easily amused. Why can't us musos have one channel catering solely for our needs?

Huey Morgan's show on a Sunday is pretty good. Shame a half hour's been knocked off Freak Zone for it though.

[Seymore Porn]

There does seem to a split identity for 6 Music at present. It's really torn between the idea that it needs 'personality' presenters to appeal to Heat readers, and the original remit that it should be presented by music lovers, for music lovers. There are too many of the former (the execrable Lamb plus unfunny comedians like Stephen Merchant and John Richardson), but this counterbalanced by the likes of Steve Lamacq, Gideon Coe, Guy Garvey and the incomparable Marc Riley. So long as enough of the latter are employed, I'll still listen in.

But there are enough stations offering inane banter for the easily amused. Why can't us musos have one channel catering solely for our needs?

Huey Morgan's show on a Sunday is pretty good. Shame a half hour's been knocked off Freak Zone for it though.

How far is Coventry from Manchester?

[Deebank]

You can always rely on St Charlie in the Guardian to get things in perspective (and be funny too).
From Charlie Brookers column today:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... sell-brand

So it's here at last. The dawn of the dumb has broken in earnest. Two mistakes occur - first Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross overstep the mark with an ill-advised bit of juvenilia, then someone decides to broadcast it. Two listeners complained, but that's by the by: it shouldn't have gone out. But then the Daily Mail - not so much a newspaper as an idiot's guidebook issued in bite-size daily instalments - uses the incident as the starting point for a full-blown moral crusade. Suddenly everyone's complaining, whether they heard the broadcast or not, largely on the basis of hysterical, boggle-eyed descriptions of what the pair said. Poor Andrew Sachs, who, having been wronged, graciously accepted their apologies and called for everybody to move on, looked bewildered by the sheer number of cameras stuck in his face. Because, by then, apologies weren't enough.

The Mail was so incensed, it printed a full transcript of the answerphone prankery under the heading "Lest We Forget" - and helpfully included outtakes that weren't even broadcast, so its readers could be enraged by things no one had heard in the first place. This was like making a point about the cruelty of fox-hunting by ripping a live fox apart with your bare hands, then poking a rabbit's eye out with a pen for good measure.

And now, like a lion developing a taste for human flesh after munching on a bit of discarded leg, the paper is on the hunt for fresh victims. First up: Brand's Channel 4 comedy show Ponderland. Readers were treated to a blow-by-blow account of what kind of depravity they could expect to see if they tuned in that evening.

"As his closing joke, he performs a graphic mime of sexual acts on a butterfly."

Funniest. Daily Mail sentence. Ever.

Friday's paper included a rundown of other "obscenities" broadcast by the Beeb, which the paper fearlessly "uncovered" by recording some TV shows and writing down some of the jokes. To protect readers' sensibilities, all the rude words were sprinkled with asterisks, although since the Mail's definition of "rude" extends to biological terms such as "penis", it was a bit like gazing at an ASCII representation of a snowstorm on a ZX Spectrum circa 1983. Perhaps next week it will produce a free sheet of asterisk stickers for readers to plaster over their own genitals, lest they catch sight of them in a mirror and indignantly vomit themselves into a coma.

One of the shows singled out was an episode of the romcom Love Soup transmitted in April that, the Mail insisted, depicted a woman being raped by a dog. I didn't see the show myself, but I doubt you saw it going in or anything, because I don't recall seeing Mark Thompson hanging from a lamppost while an angry mob kicked Television Centre to pieces. Maybe we can "devolve" to that point in time for Christmas.

Still, if it's OK to be retrospectively enraged, why stop at April? Be ambitious! Keep going! There's an endless list of comedy shows that would qualify for the Mail's hall of shame. How about Monty Python, which in 1970 included a gloriously tasteless sketch about a man eating his mother's corpse, then puking the remains into a grave? If Python had been banned, we'd never have seen Fawlty Towers or heard of Andrew Sachs in the first place - problem solved. Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, Porridge, Not the Nine O'Clock News, The Young Ones, Have I Got News For You, Blackadder, The Day Today, Little Britain, The Thick of It ... by the Mail's reckoning, each of those shows surely deserves a place on the list too. Hundreds of hours of laughter you'd never have had.

The sad, likely outcome of this pitiful gitstorm is an increase in BBC jumpiness. I have a vested interest in this, of course, because I've just started work on the next series of my BBC4 show Screen Wipe, on which we sometimes sail close to the wind. In the past, the BBC has occasionally stepped in to nix the odd line that oversteps the mark - as it should do, when parameters aren't out of whack.

But when the Beeb's under fire, those parameters can change. Last year, following the "fakery" scandals, we recorded a trailer for the series in which I mocked a BBC4 ident featuring footage of seagulls, by fooling around with a plastic seagull on a stick and muttering about how you couldn't trust anything on TV any more. Pure Crackerjack. But suddenly it couldn't be transmitted, due to "the current climate". So God knows how restrictive things might get over the coming months.

And that's just my basic, low-level gittery. If something as sublime and revolutionary as Python came along today, the Mail would try to kill it stone dead, and it'd rope in thousands of angry old idiots to help, all of them bravely marching to the Ofcom website to register their disgust. What a rush. Feel that pipsqueak throb of empowerment coursing through your starched and joyless veins! You've crushed some fun, and it feels good to be alive!

Perhaps it's time to put a "Complain to Ofcom" button right there on the remote control: if enough viewers press it, the show gets yanked immediately, like a bad variety act being pulled off stage by a shepherd's crook.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's time to establish "Counter-Complaints": a method of registering your complaint about the number of knee-jerk complaints. And one should cancel out the other - so if 25,000 people complain, and a further 25,000 counter-complain, the total number of complaints is zero. It might lead to a lot of fruitless button-mashing, but at least we can keep our shared national culture relatively sane. Because judging by the rest of the news, if the ship's going down, a few unrestricted taste-free laughs now and then might make things more bearable for all of us.

[Lone Groover]

What he said !

"How about Monty Python, which in 1970 included a gloriously tasteless sketch about a man eating his mother's corpse, then puking the remains into a grave?"

What do you want, bury her, burn'er or dump her ? God I loved reciting that sketch at school !

The shock value at the time was very high. Times change and acceptance of poor taste has engulfed many previously shocking areas. How about the Fcuk T shirts ?

[Deebank]

What he said !

"How about Monty Python, which in 1970 included a gloriously tasteless sketch about a man eating his mother's corpse, then puking the remains into a grave?"

What do you want, bury her, burn'er or dump her ? God I loved reciting that sketch at school !

The shock value at the time was very high. Times change and acceptance of poor taste has engulfed many previously shocking areas. How about the Fcuk T shirts ?

There was a man in Asda last Sunday in a bright red t shirt with 'CUNT!' in large letters on the back. I never got to see the front - perhaps it had some mitigating "oh, that's all right then!" message, but I can't see what would make it OK really.

Didn't bother me, but if my kids had been at proper reading age it might've. Saying that my fave t shirt as a student bore the legend 'Jesus Fuck' in large red letters on the front (a Jesus & Mary Chain tour t).... Student bore

[Scally Mcgrew]

There was a man in Asda last Sunday in a bright red t shirt with 'CUNT!' in large letters on the back

I'm surprised they let Footy wear his own clothes at work.