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This whole Brand/Ross thing has become a monster. It’s a silly season story that has accidentally emerged blinking into the news rush hour. I was going to post yesterday about it, but events ran away from me and suddenly Ofcom was investigating and Gordon Brown was somehow involved. It tickles me that he chose to use the two most hackneyed political terms for expressing disapproval, “inappropriate” and “unacceptable”. Politicians use these words for every damn thing, from genocide to the canteen not carrying their favourite kind of jam. But what’s he doing commenting on this in the first place? What’s next, a furious condemnation from Ban Ki-Moon? An air strike?

The simple truth, though, is that both Ross and Brand are bullies. Both men’s schtick involves a lot of self-deprecation, but it pays not to be charmed or fooled by that—their self-loathing is all too real, and they’re keen to palm it off on to others. Literally, in the case of a friend of mine who, a long time ago, was introduced to Ross as a junior writer. They shook hands in a crowded room, only for Ross to leap back and start yelling, “Ugh! Sweaty palms! He’s got the sweatiest palms! Is that even sweat? Ugh!”^[1] And so on. Territory established. New bug successfully squashed. It’s a fleeting incident, but a revealing one.

Also revealing is my friend’s experience of writing many years ago for a BBC DJ whose show went out live after midnight. The procedure was that the show would be listened through afterwards to check the content. Some of the material was a bit cheeky, but it could take weeks before they got an irritated memo saying, “For God’s sake stop making those jokes”. They rapidly realised that there was a huge backlog of shows to be checked, and they made the most of it. So it wouldn’t be entirely surprising if the Brand show, though pre-recorded, had not been listened to by the time of broadcast for similar reasons. If it was and it was cleared, someone’s definitely for the chop.

But should that include our Russ and our Jon? Of course it should. Never mind nebulous questions of standards of taste or decency in broadcasting; the abusive messages they left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone actually broke the law. Also, though Ross saw which way this was all headed at the end of last week so apologised to Sachs in writing and sent him flowers (while Brand did not), it’s noticeable that neither man has said anything contrite about Sachs’s granddaughter, the person who has been most badly treated in all this. She’s just the latest in a string of girls who have somehow been seduced by a diamond-cut jaw, a gallon of hairspray and Frankie Howerd’s vocal mannerisms, and have utterly failed to see the truth that is staring them full in the face: don’t fuck Russell Brand.

At best, you could end up as material in one of his trademark too-much-information routines about embarrassing sexual experiences. (Also, does he carry on with that “Hare Krishna” stuff even in intimate situations? Oh God.) Or he might pull a stunt like this and drag your family into it. It would be even worse, although obviously I’m not remotely suggesting that this could possibly have anything to do with him, if someone were—how to code this somehow?—to repeatedly not have sex with, and then be humiliated by, overage boys. Lucky, then, that he has no reputation for doing any such thing.

I was slightly annoyed to discover that the Telegraph (that’s not more code, just the newspaper) had come up with this connection first, but at least they’ve saved me the bother of writing something along these lines myself:

The behaviour of the Bullingdon Club in George Osborne's day was repulsive: arrogant young men, with more money than sense and no one to tell them what to do. They booked strippers, treated women like dirt, and their idea of a good time was an evening of nasty, bullying humiliation. Osborne was held upside down and banged on his head until he obligingly repeated an obscenity about himself. The stories have all the trappings of toffs enjoying themselves.

Yet look at the BBC radio studio last week: young men together, even more money than sense, lots of people around but not one who dared to stand up to them, whose idea of a radio programme was ringing up a 78-year-old and indulging in sexual boasting and nasty, bullying humiliation. Neither Jonathan Ross nor Russell Brand were members of the Bullingdon, but they do share the same sense of mischievous fun. The only difference is, the blades of the Bullingdon paid for it with their own money; Ross and Brand do it with ours. [Telegraph]

Now, I don’t think they should be sacked out of any indignation about the licence fee; I’ll leave that to the Telegraph and the Mail. I think they should be sacked because they have acted like unconscionable cowards and bullies to a man who has more dignity and decency than the pair of them. They’ve been a couple of spiteful bastards and have broken the law into the bargain, and they need to know that that’s not OK just because we’ve all heard of them.

^[1] Note for any younger readers: “Ugh” is what the British used to say in the days before “Eww”. Also, everything used to be in black and white.

Once more, with picture

It’s considerate of the BBC to illustrate this story with an appropriate photograph. A man pictured walking past the exchange rate looking miffed tells me all I need to know about the state of Ukraine’s currency. I wouldn’t have known what to think if they had run instead with something like this:

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Generally I actively avoid cricket, something that’s easier said than done if you live round the corner from a cricket ground. However, even I had been made vaguely aware of the existence of the Stanford Series, a week-long championship held in Antigua, privately sponsored by American billionaire Sir Allen Stanford, where every player in the winning team will receive $1 million. Cricket has not yet fallen prey to the warping effects of brain-crushing amounts of money being poured into the game, and concerns have been expressed that this series might herald the beginning of its slide into the kind of decadence that now characterizes football. For example, not all cricketers are yet rapists [citation needed].

It’s off to an inauspicious start. The England captain is unhappy with the state of the pitch and the health of his players: “Yes, it’s a lot of dosh,” he has said, “but the longer this week goes on the more I want to get it over with.”

Possibly the Stanford Series’s greatest liability, though, is Sir Allen Stanford. While the England team were playing a warm-up match against Middlesex, the ground’s TV screens broadcast live pictures of Sir Allen sitting in the England players’ balcony cavorting with three of their wives and girlfriends.

That’s wicketkeeper Matt Prior’s pregnant wife he’s bouncing on his knee. Prior is said to have looked “upset” when he looked up and saw the images. The other players were none too happy either. Stanford has apologised to them personally and, publicly, everyone is keen to put it behind them. But it all adds to the perception of a chaotic and unprofessional event.

Pitch for a film: As a small boy, little Allen Stanford from Texas is attacked by a cricketer (or possibly just by someone with a cricket bat). The experience scars him but drives him to succeed singlemindedly in finance so that one day he can destroy cricket, by buying the whole sport and then cuckolding all the players. Nicolas Cage to star.

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I just saw Mikey (the blind one) from this year’s Big Brother being led into the building. I’ll be honest, I hadn’t expected ever to see him here. Is he now some kind of media adviser to Gordon Brown? Is that why we were treated to the Prime Minister weighing in about Rossell Brand™? Does this mean the PM’s weekly briefings will now include an update on what he thinks about that week’s Eastenders?

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In a moment that was a distant relation of those scenes in movies where a bomb squad are faced with a device of a type they’ve never seen before but have only one minute to defuse it, with only a minute to go before Grand Committee was due to start I was handed a newly bought clock for our desk and asked to set it, apparently on the grounds that I’m familiar with technology, only to find when I’d got it out of the bubblewrap that it didn’t have buttons but had a fiddly LCD touch screen instead. I got it done, raced down the several flights of stairs, swerved into the room and plonked the clock down on the desk just as the committee began—like the climax of a very cheap episode of “Spooks”.