Entertainment - BBC & a question of taste

Hasan Suroor



In the name of encouraging “edgy” programming, is the BBC going to the other extreme?

He is paid £6 million a year by the BBC to tell smutty jokes in the name of “edgy” humour which includes embarrassing his guests with sexually explicit questions.

People who agree to appear on Jonathan Ross’s chat show know what to expect, so it would be rich of them to complain. But what about those who have a different, slightly old-fashioned, sense of their privacy and dignity and would rather be spare d his brand of humour?

That is the question the BBC is being asked to ponder after Mr. Ross, who’s such a big star that he once boasted that he was worth “a thousand BBC journalists,” and a fellow comedian/ broadcaster Russell Brand caused national outrage with their unique variety of “edgy” humour recently.

While presenting a programme on BBC Radio 2 they left — on air — an obscene telephone message for Andrew Sachs, one of Britain’s most respected actors and fondly remembered for his role of the clumsy Spanish waiter, Manuel, in the popular television series Fawlty Towers. The message, peppered with expletives, related to the private life of the 78-year-old actor’s grand-daughter.

Their action provoked fury and the BBC was bombarded with some 30,000 complaints prompting an unusual intervention by Prime Minister Gordon Brown who said such behaviour was “unacceptable.” The media, especially the Murdoch press (Times, Sky TV, Sun et al ) with its own anti-BBC axe to grind, went ballistic raising issues about the BBC’s editorial judgement and questioning whether the Ross-Brand duo (Brand’s annual fee: £200,000) was worth the “astronomical” salaries they were paid.

A former BBC director-general, Greg Dyke, said the price at which the BBC hired its top presenters was “too high for a public-funded organisation.”

Even their fans (and to be honest both have a large youth following which is why they were hired by the BBC in the first place) acknowledge that in this case they had crossed the line. What they did, it is argued, amounted to an invasion of Mr Sachs and his grand-daughter’s privacy and a public assault on their dignity. One commentator—a former “staunch” fan of Mr. Ross—wrote that they were guilty of a ``gross abuse of power, the pair of them coming to the conclusion that that they could do as they liked because an elderly, reclusive actor such as Sachs could not possibly compete against their combined star power.”

Worse, initially the BBC sat on Mr. Sachs’s complaint and his demand for an apology but after politicians waded in and the row escalated amid calls for heads to roll the management, finally, acted — apologising to Mr. Sachs and his grand-daughter; suspending Mr. Ross and Mr. Brand (the latter subsequently resigned); and ordering a review of its editorial and oversight procedures.

Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust which regulates the organisation, vowed to crack down on ``lascivious smut” ; director-general Mark Thompson agreed that the “prank should never ever happened, let alone have hit the airwaves”; and the BBC Radio 2 Controller Lesley Douglas — a highly-regarded broadcaster — resigned taking moral responsibility for the scandal.

But, haven’t we been here before? Remember the handwringing, the mea-culpas, a spate of top-level resignations and promises of a shake-up that followed the controversy over a BBC broadcast in the run-up to the Iraq invasion accusing the then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office of “sexing up” intelligence claims about the threat from Saddam Hussein?

True, things cannot always be all tickety-boo in an organisation as unwieldy, bureaucratic and under constant pressure to serve a hugely diverse and increasingly demanding audience as the BBC. And what makes it more vulnerable is that it is funded with public money (it gets £3.5 billion a year from licence fee) , so everyone feels entitled to have a go at it and hardly a week passes when the BBC does not find itself in the news for the wrong reasons.

But in this case the anger is justified, especially because the perpetrators of the so-called “prank” were not novices but veterans of their trade and are seen as role models for aspiring entertainers. In fact, there is a view that the two nearly got away with it precisely because of their celebrity status and had there not been such public outrage the BBC would have happily ignored their behaviour.

The BBC has been accused of creating stars and then not being able — or willing — to control their excesses. Mr Ross, particularly, is said to wield so much influence that even senior executives dare not cross his path.

Meanwhile, old-timers recalled that the same BBC, which today lets “lascivious smut” go on air, once had such strict guidelines on what was “off-limits” that broadcaster felt nearly gagged.

Of course, nobody wants a return to that era but is there a risk that in the name of encouraging “edgy” programming the BBC is going to the other extreme? The argument that the young lap this sort of humour is not only patronising but insulting. Their taste may be more liberal than that of their parents (as indeed every new generation’s is because of the changing cultural and social mores), but to confuse this with a taste for vulgarity is simply self-serving guff.