The real lesson is: the public don’t like Jonathan Ross or Russell Brand
Rod Liddle says that the row over their radio ‘prank’ has exposed the fact that these two smug, overpaid performers aren’t really that popular. There are no fans to defend them There’s this new deal being offered by the telephone inquiry service 118 118. If you answer a question correctly, you get to ask as many questions as you want all day, free of charge, and they will answer them. The test question they asked me was: ‘What pop star was born in Finchley on January 21, 1971?’ The answer, obviously, is Emma Bunton, also known as Baby Spice. I got a message of congratulations from 118 118 and the offer of unlimited free inquiries for the day. So I asked them what I should do next — every minute or so for the next eight hours. I am in the hall right now and quite wish to go to the lavatory, but also want a cup of tea. I cannot decide. What do you advise? Should I watch television now or pare my toenails in the bathroom? What is that slightly ominous growling noise coming from the spare bedroom? Is Jeremy Clarke still in it? And so on, all day.
With any luck this offer will be continued; every morning I get asked a simple question about some pop star and after that 118 118 tells me what to do with my life. In the late afternoon, when I was lounging on the sofa not needing any immediate direction to my activities, I asked more straightforward stuff. Like, is Gordon Brown to blame for our current financial mess (no, apparently, he is not remotely to blame). And of the two, who is the more f***ing stupid — Jonathan Ross or Russell Brand? The message came back, at the speed of light: ‘Jonathan Ross is more stupid.’ I also asked what is funnier, Jonathan Ross or venereal disease, but they got all corporate and boring and said: ‘Your 118 Team believes that whatever excites you and what type of personality you have determines which is funnier.’ So the clap, then, I reckon.
How does one explain the success of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand? Or, for that matter, the success of Little Britain, the latest series of which is mirthless and crass on a quite extraordinary level, almost enough to elevate it to the status of modern art? Ross and Brand have been in trouble this week for a radio ‘prank’ which involved the two of them leaving abusive messages on the answerphone of Andrew Sachs, the actor who played the idiotic Manuel in the situation comedy Fawlty Towers. The remarkable thing about this is that when various newspapers demanded the two be sacked from their extremely lucrative jobs, the public did not remotely turn out to defend them. Brand writes a fairly inept sports column for the Guardian, but of the scores of people who commented on the paper’s website, only one had anything nice to say about him. The rest wanted him sacked, or to be ignored, just to go away and leave us in peace. It is true that people who leave comments on websites are often motivated by spite and anger, but not universally so. The striking thing about the Guardian website was the almost complete unanimity — not so much in condemnation of the inane prank, but of the man himself. If it had been John Cleese in the dock, or Ricky Gervais, there would at least have been a handful of people saying ah, but at least he’s funny. Not with Russell and Wossy, though. It was the same at the Daily Mail’s website; nobody seemed to like these two extremely well-paid performers. They didn’t like them because they were smug, incredibly pleased with themselves, over paid, arrogant and apparently stupid — but most of all, they didn’t like them because they weren’t remotely entertaining.
Ross is well regarded within the industry, sure enough; he has won a sackful of awards and recently had the OBE bestowed upon him. But I’ve always had the suspicion that this regard is not reflected among the wider public. His Saturday show on Britain’s most popular radio channel, Radio 2, attracts an audience of just over three million, a hundred thousand or so more than listen to Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 in midweek (whose presenters, I would guess, do not receive contracts worth 18 million quid from the corporation). His television chatshow, which involves him either fawning over his friends or slobbering over actresses or simply talking about himself endlessly, does not punch its weight, either. You begin to wonder what it is that commends him to the industry, what they see in him. It is a little like the economy of the City of London, kept afloat by sheer willpower, with nothing much to back it up. I do not actually hate the chap, I just don’t understand the attraction; I don’t get it. And it looks as if I’m very far from being the only one.
While we’re on with it — how about Little Britain USA? Has the BBC ever produced a worse prime-time comedy series than this? The creators, Matt Lucas and David Walliams, have pioneered a new form of comedy which relies for its laughs not upon wit, the unexpected, the surreal, but upon the purely and deliberately predictable and the obscene. It is a sort of anti-comedy, in which you know the punchline before the sketch has even begun. Catherine Tate is another progenitor of this bizarre form of humour and has been described by the BBC as a ‘genius’. Both programmes rely upon repetition; upon shovelling on to the audience the same characters week after week with very often precisely the same dialogue. It is like an endless Sam Beckett play, except less interesting. You wonder, watching it, if alternative comedy ever existed and if so, what became of it. Walliams and Lucas were talking about their new series on the Friday Night With Jonathan Ross show a week or two back; he didn’t ask them any questions. They didn’t say anything funny. The newstyle chatshow host and the new-style comedy team, together for five minutes of almost perfect boredom.
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