We're mad as hell and we DON'T have to take it!

[Teddy Bear]

While outwardly Richard Littlejohn's brilliant piece below is concerned also with the Ross/Brand story, it goes far deeper than that, so I felt it deserved its own Topic.

Whatever happens, this event has shaken the BBC, and the public has shown how tired it is of the lame excuses and poor quality offered by the corporation.

We're mad as hell and we DON'T have to take it any more!
Last updated at 11:17 PM on 30th October 2008

Even if the BBC attempts to rehabilitate Jonathan Ross by forcing him to present Songs Of Praise, accompanied by Four Happily Married Men and a Piano, it's already too late.
As it is, he's been suspended for three months without pay - no great financial hardship in the scheme of things - and Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas has resigned.
But my guess is that the BBC still doesn't begin to understand what's been going on this past week.

This was always about much, much more than the fate of a couple of presenters and the 'systemic' failures that allowed them to bully and ridicule an old man and his granddaughter in the name of 'entertainment'.
Lesley Douglas, a decent woman, has done the decent thing. But it's not important how many heads rolled - though it's worth noting that when Andrew Gilligan told the truth about Alastair Campbell, the Director-General himself had to walk the plank.
If they think this 'draws a line' under this whole sordid affair, time to 'move on', chuck a couple of bodies over the side and it's everybody back on the coach, then they're horribly mistaken.
Whatever has happened since that suicidally ill-advised broadcast, this incident and the response to it has encapsulated perfectly the institutionalised hubris at the BBC. Now it's nemesis time.
If the Tories could but see it, there's a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity here. The BBC is an ideal example of a nationalised industry which has grown bloated and lost sight of its remit.
Here is the scope for Call Me Dave and Boy George to demonstrate exactly how they can cut taxes without cutting public services.
I was going to say that the BBC epitomises the big state in microcosm, except that microcosm isn't the best way to describe such a behemoth.
This year, the Corporation will receive £3.2billion from the licence fee - a poll-tax of £139.50 a year on every household in the land.

Even in these extraordinary times, where billions are bandied around like petty cash, that's a hell of a chunk of change.

Put it another way. For £3.2 billion, you could buy Iceland and Hungary and still have enough left for a fish supper on the way home.
The Tories could explain how that tax could be slashed dramatically, or even abolished altogether, without viewers and listeners suffering.
I'd give the BBC enough money to run Radio 4 and maybe two television channels. I'd also allow them to set up subscription channels for say, sport, and the arts.

If Setanta and Sky can do it, why not the Beeb?
What is it that BBC1 does that the independent sector can't do just as well?

Do I hear Little Dorrit and the Blue Planet? Well, if the Beeb wasn't there to distort the market, I'm sure a privatised Channel 4 in partnership with Discovery or Disney would be happy to pick up the ball.
HBO manages to produce some of the best television drama in the world without a penny in public subsidy.
No one would be disadvantaged if Radios 1 and 2 were sold off. Radio 3 could seek corporate sponsorship or go to the wall.

Those who want to listen to classical music all day can tune in to Classic FM or buy a CD.

And if people must have the kind of peurile trash provided by the likes of Russell Brand, they can pay for that themselves. It's not the job of public service broadcasting to supply it.
As for all those digital radio and TV channels, they seem to exist merely to stifle the competition.

Why, for instance, is the BBC running an Asian service when enterprising businessmen are queuing up to launch dedicated Asian TV and radio stations, funded by advertising?
There would be many more of these niche channels, too, if the playing field didn't resemble the north face of the Eiger.
Where it all started to go wrong was when the BBC decided to launch breakfast television in an attempt to stymie the start-up of TV mayhem.
Since then, they've worked on the basis that anything the private sector does, they have to do, too, only without the risk of going bankrupt.
Talk radio would be a goldmine had not the Beeb poured millions into Radio 5 to try to kill Britain's first national commercial talk station at birth.

Now, an expansion into local news threatens to sound the death knell for regional weekly and evening newspapers, already struggling to maintain circulation and classified advertising in the digital age.
I could go on to include the BBC's hugely-expensive internet operation. Who voted for that?
The fact that the BBC thought it could get away with giving Jonathan Ross a contract worth £6 million a year is indicative of how it has lost touch not just with economic reality, but with the people who pay its wages.
If the commercial television sector thought he was worth that kind of money, they'd be queuing up to give it to him. And I'd be the first to say: good luck to him. Believe me, they don't. And they're not.
What Ross and Brand did to Andrew Sachs would have been just as appalling if they'd both been earning £20,000 a year.

Ross's astronomical salary shouldn't be a factor, but it has rightly become the factor as the week has worn on.
This isn't about envy, or resentment. People don't begrudge stars vast salaries if they earn them on the open market.
What we have seen this week is a visceral scream from Middle England - G. K. Chesterton's 'secret people' - against the way in which their money is taken on pain of imprisonment and spent without any further reference to them.
If, when people were asked for their £139.50 licence money, they were told that part of it was going to be used to finance an £18million contract for a chat-show host cum disc jockey, they'd never have signed the cheque.
That's where the opportunity for the Tories comes in. The BBC is run like Britain is governed. They think our job is to pay, theirs is to spend - no questions asked or tolerated.

They work on the basis that we give them the money and then we get what we're given, whether we like it or not.
If the Conservatives can demonstrate where the BBC can be cut back, without cutting services, then why not those other ravenous monsters such as the NHS, local government and Whitehall?
Better still, let's channel the outrage towards the BBC and Jonathan Ross into a full-scale revolt against the tens of billions wasted by Government departments and Town Halls, the bloated salaries paid to 'chief executive officers' and the standing army of meddlesome Guardianistas; and the fortunes wasted on 'services' we neither ask for nor want.
For instance, if it can be proven that the BBC could be effectively privatised, why not refuse collection? It would be much cheaper and there'd be none of this 'alternative weekly collections' nonsense.
If all those people who have complained to the BBC this week did the same to their local MP, to their Town Hall, to Gordon Brown, we might just be in with a fighting chance of changing something.
Why - to take just one example from this week's news - should we pay taxes to fund the wages of 'experts' who visit schools trying to force children to stand on chairs and pledge not to be nasty to 'travellers'?
Why should we finance a vast elf 'n' safety industry dedicated to interfering in every nook and cranny of our lives, to finding out what we like to do and then devising ways to stop us?
Why should we pay six-figure salaries to po-faced puritans who spend their lives dreaming up new ways to fine and punish us for trivial and invented 'crimes'?
Why should we put up with being charged billions for a National Health Service run entirely for the benefit of the people who work in it, while the rest of us can wait weeks for a doctor's appointment and have to pay again, privately, to see a dentist?
Why should we pay for a police 'service' which spends most of its time playing politics and persecuting motorists, while failing to protect our property or patrol the streets?
Let this revulsion at the excesses of the BBC be the start of a popular revolution against an arrogant and largely unaccountable elite and their contempt for the paying public.
It's taken a seemingly minor incident to focus our attention on the way not just the BBC, but the whole of Britain is run.
This was the week decent people stood up and cried, like Peter Finch in the movie Network: 'We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more.'
We don't have to take it lying down. This has been a stunning victory for common decency over the self-appointed, self-obsessed, metropolitan narcissists who control so much of our public life.
At last, the secret people of England have spoken.
The BBC suits still don't get it. They're already retreating behind the usual cosy platitudes about lessons learned, processes reviewed, blah, blah, blah.
Though he's avoided the guillotine, I suspect Jonathan Ross does finally get it. Never glad, confident Saturday morning again.
The game's up.

[Teddy Bear]

Continuing in the same vein, another article, this time by Charles Moore, eloquently defines what it is about this particular episode that is so disgusting. Not just the action itself, but the subsequent reaction by the BBC. It highlights the mindset that allows and perpetrates this kind of behaviour, and for him it is 'the last straw' that will cause him to break the law, and cease to pay the BBC license fee, and further advocates you do the same with a boycott.

I hope this becomes a movement until BBC funding is no more.

Jonathan Ross's theatre of cruelty must be stopped with BBC licence fee boycott
By Charles Moore

The BBC wants to "draw a line" under the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand affair and "move on". "Moving on", like "pushing the boundaries" in comedy, is the fashionable thing to do. I suggest, though, that we should refuse to move an inch.

By not sacking, but merely suspending, Jonathan Ross, the BBC has avoided the one action that really would have made a difference. Brand and an executive or two can be jettisoned.

Ross, in BBC eyes, is the valuable one (£18 million over three years: roughly five annual licence fees per hour). They are still determined to put our money where his mouth is.

I find myself in the strange position of recommending that people listen to the full recording of the Ross/Brand BBC broadcast of their telephone calls to Andrew Sachs's answering machine. You need to do so to understand what we are dealing with.

People keep describing these calls as "mindless", "a mistake", a "prank". If you listen, you realise they are none of these things.

They are, in a revolting way, intelligent, and they are perfectly deliberate, made by people who feel that they have impunity. What they are trying to do, in the name of being "edgy", is to hurt.

One of the things that emerged in the course of this scandal is that, by her own account, Mr Sachs's granddaughter did sleep with Brand. This surely makes the calls a much more malign attack than if she had not.

Brand and Ross decided to ring her grandfather to torment him about it. It was not a random, babyish, obscene call, but a considered one, based on knowledge.

In the course of their on-air conversation, the pair joke that, near their telephones, most grandparents have photographs of their grandchildren sitting on a swing, so they decide, laughing hysterically, to point out to Mr Sachs that Brand "enjoyed" his granddaughter on a swing. They say many, many other targeted, horrible things.

In short, they think through all the permutations of mental pain that can be inflicted, and inflict them.

When the Abu Ghraib atrocities against Iraqi prisoners filled our media, people rightly noted that the torment consisted not in physical pain, but in humiliation.

The humiliation was increased by photographing the acts. The torturers thought that what they did was funny. They were arrested, dismissed from the US armed services and imprisoned.

Jonathan Ross was doing essentially the same thing. He thought it was funny to use his power to torment someone mentally, and to let other people witness the torment. His punishment so far is to earn £4.6 million this year from the BBC, instead of £6 million.

We keep being told that "the younger audience" like Ross and Brand. I question whether this is as true as BBC executives assert.

Like investment banks until the crash, they grossly overpaid and overindulged their stars because they thought there was a "new paradigm" of ever-better results to be made from junk. There wasn't. The BBC is now experiencing its own credit crunch.

But if there is an audience that likes torment and degradation, is it part of the job of "public service broadcasting" to cater for it? Mightn't the BBC have a duty to improve the taste of the next generation rather than lowering it?

Ancient Roman crowds liked slave gladiators killing one another in front of them and watching Christians being eaten by lions. Did the director-general of the Colosseum defend these practices on the grounds that they were "pushing the boundaries" of entertainment?

But I do find it interesting that the case is argued in terms of an age divide. It is an important part of the Brand/Ross calls to Andrew Sachs - indeed it is, in their eyes, the cream of the joke - that he is old. It is precisely because he is a grandfather that they want to hurt him.

This is not an isolated incident. On Mock the Week on BBC2 on Wednesday, the show imitated a Christmas broadcast by the Queen.

It is unrepeatable - though, like so many BBC programmes, this one was a repeat - but it explicitly mocks the Queen's sexual organs because she is old.

Two years ago, Jonathan Ross asked David Cameron whether he masturbated about Margaret Thatcher: it was the same thing - a revolting fantasy against an old person.

There is a laddishness here ( it is very hard to imagine this sort of "edgy" comedy being perpetrated by women) which enjoys attacking the weak, and, unchecked, goes ever further. One feels that a real hatred lurks within.

Mr Sachs is old enough to have spent his early years in Nazi Germany. He grew up in Berlin knowing what it is like to be unreasoningly hated because of being Jewish. That is why his family escaped to Britain. Seventy years later, the Broadcasting Corporation of the nation to which he fled has permitted him to be unreasoningly hated because he is old.

These BBC gerontophobes think that they are being bravely iconoclastic, but it cannot be said too often that it is they who are the establishment, they who have the power, they who take our money.

Why should Mark Thompson, the director-general, get £816,000 per year? Is his publicly funded job really worth four times more than that of the Prime Minister?

How can Jonathan Ross be at the cutting edge of comic courage when he has lawyers and financial advisers and earns three times as much money in a day as the old age state pension for an entire year?

No, power is concentrated, with the force of law, in the hands of those who either hate old people, courtesy and decency, or are prepared out of cowardice to indulge such hatred in their performers.

Yet whence comes this power? From every citizen who owns a television and is forced to pay the BBC a tax of £139.50 a year for the privilege. Such a tax has always been indefensible in principle, and now it is intolerable in practice.

Yes, like many people reading this column, I like large parts of Radio 4 and Radio 3. But why should this be used as blackmail by which I can only have them if I hand over much larger sums so that people like Ross can kick my country and my values in the teeth?

At a time when taxes are rising, it would be a political winner for a party to promise the abolition of the licence fee, but of course this won't happen. Conservatives and Labour alike are terrified of the way the BBC would trash them if they did.

So it falls to us, the public. We do not have the power to stop Ross and Co by switching off. Time, then, to revolt.

My own modest contribution will be as follows. If Ross is still in post when my television licence next comes up for renewal, I shall keep my television, but refuse to pay the fee.

Instead, I shall hand over the £139.50 to Help the Aged, and wait for Mark Thompson's detector van to come to my door.