The sad case of the silly boys and the Satanic Slut

ONLY A week ago I was begging for a story, any story, to knock the self-pitying credit crunch misery off the front pages and from our news bulletins. Listening to Radio 4 had become rather like having a permanent window on a Bridgend teenager’s bedroom. The TV news had you reaching for the loaded revolver. But I didn’t think it would be two pathetic, giggling, overgrown schoolboys and a tasteless, tawdry joke on the wireless that would grab forests of newsprint and acres of TV screen.

But unfortunately, since Sunday, there’s been no escape from Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand and the subsequent media maelstrom their antics have produced. The feeding frenzy has been bizarre; the proportionality of the coverage completely out of well, proportion. But let’s look at a few facts.

After the misguided broadcast on October 18th, there were two complaints about the comments left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone about his grand-daughter, Georgina Baillie. That’s just two complaints. Perhaps only a few thousand people even heard the offensive comments, although the show is reckoned to have an audience of some two million. After someone at the BBC (and we’ll return to that in a moment) tipped off the Mail on Sunday which then splashed the story on its front page, the world went mad, with 27,000 complaints logged at the time of writing, including one from a certain Mr Gordon Brown of Westminster, who you might think has more important things to worry about.

So what happened? Where did the momentum come from? We must first turn to Mr Ross’s well-publicised salary of £18 million of public money over three years and his comments, when the deal was criticised by news staff, that he was “worth 1,000 BBC journalists”. There is no doubt whatsoever that there is an element of revenge at work here. You might also wonder who alerted the Mail on Sunday to the broadcast more than a week after it took place. Then there’s the public envy and dislike of a performer who is not to everyone’s taste but who is pocketing the entire licence fees of a town the size of Bournemouth, population 166,000. (Good God, even that loathsome porker and well-known paragon of virtue Piers Morgan had a pop at him.)

The BBC’s abject failure to kill the story stone dead with an immediate apology and the sacking of the numptie producer who allowed the programme to go out unedited has also left this once-great institution under siege. Commercial rivals and most national newspapers rarely forgo the chance to pillory the Beeb, regarding it as out-of-touch, politically biased, wasteful and lazy. And they’re probably right. The hyping-up of Manuelgate is too good to miss. (There’s a thought. I wonder how many complaints were received about Mr Sachs’s depiction of a blundering Spaniard?)

And then what about the young lady so viciously maligned in the telephone message? Well, ‘maligned’ is clearly the wrong word, because it suggests an element of untruth. As we now know, courtesy of her deal with Max Clifford and her decision to sell her exclusive story to The Sun, she was indeed a self-confessed conquest of the priapic Mr Brand. Furthermore, she’s a wannabe singer/model/Page 3 girl who is a member of a burlesque troupe called the Satanic Sluts and whose website is adorned with pictures of her posing in basque and suspenders or even less. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, but I would suggest that perhaps an ambitious young lady who’s quite happy to get her baps out for public display might not be entirely averse to being splashed all over the newspapers.

What a shame she’s had to cut short her tour with the Satanic Sluts to take maximum advantage of all the publicity … err … sorry, “comfort her grandfather”.

EDIT: Since writing this, the shy and retiring Georgina Baillie, who is mortally offended by details of her sex life being made public, has turned up in a porn film, being not at all shy and retiring. I'd link to it but you'd get in trouble at work or with your wife.

TWO ITALIAN football fans who started fighting on a Ryanair flight bringing them to this country have appeared in court near Stansted charged with affray, had their passports confiscated and been ordered to stay in Newport, Gwent, until December 19.

Newport, Gwent? What’s going on here? Whatever happened to the principle of ‘innocent until proved guilty’? Why this ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, outlawed until now by our 400-year-old Bill of Rights.

Are the CIA involved? This is like extraordinary rendition - take the suspects to some backwater country outside the view of the modern western world and hope to extract confessions from them. Where’s that Shami Chakrabarti when you need her?

I SUPPOSE it shouldn’t beggar belief these days, but I’m still left gob-smacked by the news that plans for an outdoor Christmas ice rink in the genteel city of Bath have been scuppered over fears that it could be used by paedophiles to groom children. Have you ever heard such tosh in your life?

The plan was withdrawn by organisers because of doubts raised by a local primary school near the proposed site about “child protection issues”. Quite what these “issues” are it’s hard to understand, particularly as the rink would have been near a leisure centre, rugby club and cricket club which presumably are already sites where children gather.

The boss of the ice rink company doesn’t mince his words: “It comes as a great shame when something as fun and innocent as an ice rink can be thwarted due to unfounded suggestions by a minority with a misguided agenda.”

And so say all of us. Perhaps the Headmaster was worried that BBC radio presenters might start phoning up his pupils …