Filth

[fpb]

If the BBC were an organization with any respect for decency, Jonathan Ross would have been sacked on the spot, and Russell Brand blacklisted for life. Once upon a time, a man caught doing anything half as dishonourable would have been quietly approached by colleagues and left alone in a room with a tot of brandy and a loaded pistol.

Comments

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Uh oh,who are these guys and what did they do?

[filialucis]

I second the question.

And I love your icon. :)

[tashmania.livejournal.com]

To be honest I have no idea why they're on the air in the first place. I've never found either of them funny, and the whole sorry saga just reinforces their pointlessness. How they could think their behaviour was anything but childish and crude, I do not know.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/terence-blacker/terence-blacker-when-did-bullying-become-acceptable-975457.html

And bear in mind that I deliberately went to the hardest-left, most unsympathetic, most pro-BBC newspaper in Britain.

Russell Brand is the British "comedian" who so endeared himself with Americans recently by telling them that the were morons if they voted for McCain.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/terence-blacker/terence-blacker-when-did-bullying-become-acceptable-975457.html

And I have gone for the description to the most left-wing, pro-BBC newspaper in Britain. This is not a party matter: everyone is outraged.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

I would hope they get fired, but unfortunately this kind of stuff is stock in trade for a lot of "morning show" radio DJs over here. The one that comes to mind right now is the two DJs in NYC who instigated someone to have sex in St.Patrick's Cathedral. Those two did get fired, I believe.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The extent of things wrong is just staggering. They attacked poor Sachs because he would not appear on their show. They attacked an older man, in defiance of the universal norm that the elderly are to be respected. They attacked someone who is genuinely loved - Manuel is enduringly popular - and for good reason. They did so in the crudest, most villainous manner imaginable: where I come from, only thirteen-year-old schoolyard bullies say "I fucked your sister" as an insult. Nobody stopped for a minute to wonder about the sense of it, let alone the dencency or the point. And on and on...

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Thanks, it's just so concise, isn't it? ;)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that these two are hand in glove with management. The BBC is doing everything in its power to defend them.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

If there's enough public complaints it might override that? That's what happened to the guys I mentioned above.

Something I Just Saw Earlier

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Have you seen this yet?--->

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmFhYzIzMGQ1Y2FlMTA4N2M1N2VmZWUzM2Y4ZmNmYmI=

I'd be interested to know what you think of it.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

Stomach-turning.

Unfortunately, there is a substantial audience who thinks that smutty talk is hilarious, and that it's even funnier when the person being talked about is in no position to defend him- or herself.

Otherwise, why would a whole pack of so-called comedians like Andrew Dice Clay have made such careers of talk that ought to have gotten their mouths washed out with soap when they were of an age that it might have done some good.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

Wow. Damn. That's revolting. But it was done in the name of entertainment so the Beeb'll do their best to defend them.

[filialucis]

Thanks for the link... I think. What an inexpressibly revolting story. :S

[fpb.livejournal.com]

"Inexpressibly revolting" just about sums it up. The most horrendous fact about it is that this kind of ambush is apparently standard practice among radio jocks. The fact that I never follow those broadcasts explains, I suppose, why I find it so outrageous. But it is not myself alone - millions upon millions of Britons are disgusted and protesting, which gives me some slight hope.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You talk as if the BBC were sensitive to public complaints. They aren't. They are not paid for by the pubic, but by a tax - a "canon" - on every TV set in the country, and if you don't pay you go to jail. Even kennahijja, a German leftie with no love for private media businesses, is outraged at the idea.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

That's....words fail me. If I lived there I probably wouldn't have a TV set, rather than pay the tax. I already get people saying "OMGyoudon'thavecable!!!1" to me on a regular basis, but I refuse to pay for extra channels when most of my favorite shows are on network (=free) channels.

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

They've both been sacked/"resigned".

I'm guessing that Russell Brand is even now writing jokes about it for his show on Sunday night in Los Angeles, though. The professional offense-giver. He's going to be appearing in a Disney Christmas film, apparently. Lovely.

And since apparently Brand really did sleep with Ms. Baillie, I hope this will warn other women what kind of man he is and kind of risk they're taking if they choose to sleep with him.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Execrable. When I was young, I grew up on imported British television, and (with the ignorance afforded by youth and an ocean's worth of distance) used to admire the BBC a great deal. How far back does this decline go?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The BBC has always, within living memory, been "progressive". It embraced the Sixties with enthusiasm and helped strangle in the cradle the few weak attempts to establish a real British cultural conservative movement in the seventies (by Mary Whitehouse, whom they worked to demonize). But in all this, it was never too distant from the common feeling of the country. I think the first danger signal was the definite partisanship with which Margaret Thatcher was met; but then MT was a deeply polarizing figure who never met anything except proselytizing support or (my choice) profound hate. But really, since the Tory Blur won in 1997, it has been plain ruination. Blair carried on what had been the real trend of the Thatcher years - Thatcher was totally uninterested in cultural conservatism - by associating Politically Correct social positions with a wholly Thatcherite, "pro-business" policy. Looking back, it is clear that that policy did business as a whole no good at all; and that its loose credit policy and looser morals of uncontrolled and indeed pampered greed were the exact parallel of the PC world that devastated civil society in Britain and led to situations of absolutely unimaginable social collapse outside the fortresses of privilege from which the Blairs and the BBC barons sally out. One example is the rise of a murderous gang culture, which I commented on here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/250748.html. Another is the really unimaginable ignorance of basic sexual morals which led a woman with seven children from six different parents, living in the slums of a North English town, to call two of them "the twins" not because they are, but because they are the only ones of her brood who share a physical father. Such examples could be multiplied.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The girl herself is a stripper by profession, she is out in public, and is therefore fair game. But she was merely an excuse for a vicious public beating of her grandfather, who was elderly, uninvolved in her antics, and a beloved figure who had had a major role in the greatest English sitcom ever made (he was Manuel the helpless waiter in Fawlty Towers). The general feeling is a cross between their kicking a helpless dog in the street, and insulting a national monument.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

PS, if Ms.Baillie ever needed any instruction in "what kind of man" this public scumbag-by-trade really is, she must be a lot more unworldly than the average stripper ought to be. I would rather say that, since she is supposed of being very fond of her grandfather, she might now reflect on the effect her lifestyle has had on him.

Mind you, some parents and grandparents deserve what they get. The daughter of one of the worst Islamic hate preachers in Britain left her father's house to become a pole dancer in Catford (down the road from where I live and not a very respectable quarter) and live without marriage with a succession of mostly non-Muslim men. My only reaction was: it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.