Edgy, Indeed

Charles Moore writes:

It is impossible to be ‘edgy’ if you are paid £6 million (or even £200,000) out of compulsory television licence-fee money and are backed by the biggest broadcasting organisation in the world. Ross and Brand might have some use, and some courage, if they were struggling on the low-paid pub circuit, living dangerously off their scabrous wit. But their position is one of the most incredible privilege, deferred to by bosses who are terrified of seeming stuffy and have no sense of humour or honour of their own with which to exercise judgment.

Like caricatures of French aristocrats before the Revolution, the Brands and Rosses are allowed to make sport of the vulnerable and continue to exact their taxes from the peasantry (you and me). The BBC, so down on a politician who makes an off-colour remark about immigration, so passionately concerned to forbid anything on air which might give any offence to Muslims, lets its stars make obscene and threatening telephone calls to a Jewish grandfather in order to get millions to laugh at his humiliation. Mr Sachs’s father fled Nazi persecution in Berlin in the 1930s and brought his family to England. Could he ever have imagined that, 70 years after the Kristallnacht, his son would end up being telephoned by this ‘comic’, post-modern version of the Gestapo?

Russell Brand is not in Who’s Who, I see, and all the BBC executives wisely give only Broadcasting House as their address, but Jonathan Ross can be found via his agent or firm, Off the Kerb Productions — 0207 700 4477. Why not ring him up and leave some ‘edgy’, amusing messages?