Another week, another lynching mob. The press has effectively hounded Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross out of their highly paid jobs at the BBC after a week of damning headlines.
Kat Faulkner’s blog drew my attention to this article in The Indy, which claims that only two people complained about the pair’s lewd antics on Radio Two after the show. But thanks to press coverage, the number of complaints has risen to 27,000.
This prompted the BBC to suspend Brand and Ross and tonight Brand announced that he would quit his show.
Strangely Gordon Brown may have delivered the final blow by getting involved yesterday. Both the Mail and the Telegraph splashed on Brown’s ‘condemnation’ of Ross and Brand. Brown ventured off piste during a joint press conference with Nicholas Sarkozy in order to criticise the celebs. It’s not the first time that a couple of mumbled lines from Brown have helped to fuel a media frenzy. Last week Brown’s nonsensical call for an inquiry into George Osborne’s dealings with Russia’s richest man helped to keep the scandal going.
In both cases Brown spoke out of turn, but it must be fun for him to play the executioner for once.
Someone was saying on the Media Guardian podcast last week, some ‘media type’, that Brown’s call for an inquiry was a mistake because it killed the story stone dead. Which it did. There’s nowhere left for it to go.