Ross on Why?

If you read the blog threads on the Guardian and Independent websites, it rapidly becomes clear that there is a certain kind of person that sees the uproar caused by Russell Brand/Jonathon Ross's telephone prank as yet another example of Great Britain lurching to the right quicker than David Beckham in an England shirt. The Brand/Ross supporters, with a few honourable exceptions, regard themselves as distinctively individual with a penchant for straight talking. No doubt they would also describe themselves as liberal; with a lower case l, of course. Politically, they are more likely to favour the extreme left of the political spectrum.

There is no-one quite as illiberal as the confirmed liberal. Come to think of it, there are very few people in this world quite as conformist in their thinking as those who, on the whole, pride themselves on their non-conformist approach to life. To prove just how non-conformist they are, they plaster the walls of the accounts department where they work with posters like; "You don't have to be mad to work here - but it helps."
They are the people who campaign furiously against modern technology and see no irony in the fact that they use Blackberries and lap-tops to co-ordinate their campaigns. They are the people who would vigorously protest against any kind of discrimination on the basis of colour or creed but who happily vilify millions of people base solely on the newspaper they choose to read over their breakfast cereals.
For proof of this, you need do no more than trawl through the comments posted on the Guardian and Indie websites. The first thing that becomes apparent is their uniform belief that the whole furore has been fomented by the Daily Mail to undermine the BBC. The second is the relative paucity and shallowness of their comments.
They are, for the most part, devoid of original thought and lean heavily on strident repetition for effect. Overall, their command of English, their ability to spell fairly commonplace words and parse a sentence correctly diminish in inverse proportion to their level of support for Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross.
The more strident the tone of their postings, the more dismissive of Mail readers, the poorer their command of English. Given the frequency of their posts, many of them must be low level Civil Servants or be marking time between jobs with stints on the computers in the local library.
A common athread running through all of their postings is that only two people complained about the broadcast itself. It wasn't until the bloody Daily Mail took up the cudgels that the whole thing got blown out of proportion. Without the Mail's intervention, the 30,000 that, sheep-like, eventually complained to the BBC would never have been any the wiser.
This is a completely spurious argument. If I don't personally see a murder or a rape does that make my disgust any less valid? If I don't witness people dying in an Asian Tsunami should I care less than those who were actually on the ground when the event took place? Of course not. The fact that I learn about or experience the event through a news medium doesn't make the emotion it stirs in me any less valid.
Equally, the fact that 30,000 people didn't hear the actual show doesn't invalidate their right to feel angry and outraged that it was ever allowed to be broadcast.
Personally, I didn't hear the programme and, having read the transcripts, wasn't particularly offended by the content. What really got up my nose was the sheer juvenile nastiness of what Ross/Brand did. It was the broadcasting equivalent of a couple of playground bullies picking on a smaller kid for having a snotty nose or glasses. It was cruel. It was arrogant. But, most of all, it was distinctly unfunny.
The liberals constantly trot out the old sore that, to be effective, comedy has to have an edge; has to be "relevant" - whatever that might mean - and break the boundaries of conventional behaviour. That's just so much twaddle.
Comedy's only job is to make the audience laugh. It has no higher calling than that. If it fails then patently it's not comedy at all. On that basis alone, the two broadcasters deserved to be given the boot.