I’m sorry, I broke my promise. But when you read such class-driven snobbery from a buffoon like Stephen Glover in, yep, you guessed it, the Daily Mail, I can’t resist.
Here are some of the “highlights” – I urge you to read this total garbage in full, and then wash your mouth out after you’ve gagged.
“The suspension of the foul-mouthed Jonathan Ross and the forced resignation of his equally disagreeable sidekick Russell Brand marked an extraordinary historic cultural victory. For the first time in living memory, the BBC has signalled that there are boundaries of decency it must not cross.”
In the Daily Mail today, we tell you what these lines are……. after all, we, and we alone, are the sole arbiters of these lines. We are the people.
“But, my goodness, didn’t this admission take a long time coming? No one at the BBC appeared to realise that the original show broadcast by Radio 2 on October 18 was so offensive.”
Two people who listened to it live found it offensive – no-one else realised it was offensive at the time. 10000 others found it offensive 10 days later. Amazing what a press campaign can do, isn’t it? Most of us had let it pass by in ignorance because most of us don’t listen to Radio 2. You couldn’t let it lie….. obviously for public decency’s sake, not to bash a successful behemoth like the BBC…
“Ross and Brand’s vulgar abuse of the actor Andrew Sachs was passed on the nod by a 25-year-old Radio 2 producer, even though Mr Sachs had refused his permission.
That young man evidently did not know any better. But nor did his bosses. It took several days of mounting Press coverage, and critical remarks by David Cameron, Gordon Brown and other politicians, before the BBC’s management finally responded.
Note Cameron before Brown. That made me chuckle. Old Etonians first, eh? Prime Minister, get to the back. Kircaldy High School and University of Edinburgh. Frightful oik. Eton, Brasenose Oxford and the Octagon Club – he should be leader so I’ll jolly well pretend he is.
Even then the person whose head was pushed above the parapet was that of Tim Davie, the ‘director of audio and music’, of whom none of us had ever heard. “
Where do I start with these three paragraphs. 25 year old = thick, stupid, inarticulate and without any recognition of the environment surrounding him – oh and tasteless. That’s all you under-25s tagged as scumbags. No ageism here. “The young man did not know any better” – how fucking patronising can you get? Yes, I’m being vulgar and crude. You look like the sort of person who gets offended by it, and I’d dearly like that.
“Only yesterday did Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general, and the man ultimately responsible for the Corporation’s output, break his holiday and announce that he was suspending Ross and Brand.
His statement was certainly everything one might have wished for, referring as it did to ‘a gross lapse of taste that has angered licence payers’, but it had to be wrung out of him.
Mr Thompson is a deeply symbolic figure of our times. He is not a bad man. He is civilised and well-read, having taken a first in English at Oxford.”
He went to Oxford and got a first, ergo, he’s a good man. Class-ridden snobbery. He goes to church. Class-ridden snobbery. He is civilised. Class-ridden snobbery. Instead of making the point, as he should have, that breaking his holiday for a load of old nonsense like this is about as out of scale as it gets, he is lauded instead for some fawning attempt at Daily Mail placation. Ergo, he is not a bad man. Everyone else, who I presume did not get a first at Oxford and goes to church are unfettered scumbags. Sorry, I pre-empted the next bit about the church…
“As a devout Roman Catholic, he adheres to moral values that are a million miles from those of Ross and Brand. And yet he has made no attempt to stem the tide of clod-hopping filth that pours out of their, and others’, mouths whenever they broadcast. “
Here we go – a catholic, so he has moral superiority over us mere atheists. Those religious types have never done any harm to anyone, have they? Scarcely believable anyone can write this garbage. Remember, Peter Sutcliffe heard voices from God.
Cold-hopping filth….oooooh get her. Some people quite like it mate, it may offend you, and evidently it does, but the local man and woman I know does not want a diet of Radio 4 programming 24 hours a day across the BBC’ss entire network. My sense is that you upper class twits are miffed it was on Radio 2 – the erstwhile home of the greats of their day; Terry Wogan, Jimmy Young, Pete Murray and tedium that I was forced to listen to like Sing Something Fucking Simple – I added the vulgarity for effect - et al… now those 40 somethings are bufton tuftons, and there are new 40 somethings who’ve grown up with the likes of Ross, Enfield, Atkinson, et al and the humour is a bit more edgy. It is about taste. If you don’t like it, don’t listen to it. You aren’t fighting Andrew Sachs’ battle here, you are fighting the BBC and a pathetic snob-ridden class war. Peasants pay the licence fee too.
Why should this be? Perhaps Mr Thompson believes that Ross and Brand are popular figures who will attract a large audience. Although the BBC is protected from commercial realities, it increasingly conducts itself as though these are the only realities that matter.
Shielded from the market, the Corporation often strives to outdo the market in offering dumbed-down programming, and appealing to the lowest common denominator.
What this really comes down to is you want your good clean fun on the BBC and “popular” stuff should be for those commercial people who make money out of it. I don’t want to watch International Croquet, a chamber concert from Putney Downs, nor a diet of people scratching their chins at paintings – the BBC is entitled to be popularist – it isn’t a crime. It’s a balance. Don’t use two people beating up on an old man to reinforce your class driven snobbery, you ponce.
“But I fancy there is a deeper psychological explanation for Mr Thompson’s indulgence of so-called entertainers against whose vulgarity and ignorance he must privately recoil.
Whereas some on the Left embrace Brand for his nihilism and for what they regard as his welcome flouting of bourgeois values – he seems eager to copulate with anything that moves – Mr Thompson is a more elevated, as well as a more interesting, character. “
Brand = scum, because he’s ill educated and filthy and has long hair and likes to shag decent looking women. I don’t like him, you know that, but Jesus, you wouldn’t mind being him, would you? He’s not exactly having a bad life now, although he has no moral compass – oh well, he’ll pay in hell, it is his choice. Mr Thompson, of course, has a first from Oxford and has a job where you have to cut short holidays because the Daily Mail has the hump. He’s more interesting because he wears a suit. He’ll be rewarded in heaven. God, they’ll be disappointed if this religion game is just a confidence trick, won’t they?
“Like so many modern liberal-minded intellectuals, he has a horror of being judgmental. He knows that Jonathan Ross is a coarse figure, but he reasons that if there are people who enjoy his crudeness and lavatory humour and peppering of four-letter words, he is not going to prevent them from having what they desire. “
Look, I have a go at the liberal media elite as much as anyone, telling me that James Bond is one step removed from paedophilia, but this is priceless. You are part of it, you twat. You, and the same imposition of your moral compass on me that the “liberal media” so love doing in the opposite direction are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Instead this class driven snobbery (we having a count how many times I use this phrase) is every bit as despicable as the liberals you so decry. You are censorious. That’s wrong. What happens if I upset you? You want to shut me up? You want to decide what decency is? According to you decency is only yours if you go to the right school and go to church. You intolerant imbecile.
“There is a fissure in him that permits this moral relativism. For himself and his family he wants culture and standards of decency, but if there are others who prefer dross, he is not going to stand in their way.
I didn;t read the Daily Mail today, and in fact, I never do, but on their online edition we have pictures of two Bond girls in short skirts. Very high brow and intellectual, and not dross at all…… In the sidebar we have breathless trailers for Peter Andre’s denial that there is a problem with his marriage to a former topless model with big funbags. Judi Dench has a 007 tattoo…. very high brow. Hypocrites.
Yet, more than any other organisation, the BBC should not be in the business of providing dross. It is protected from the market. It was founded on high and noble principles.
Like the Daily Mail, no doubt. High and noble principles indeed. I’m retching.
It does not have to follow the worst trends – far less take the lead – and lure us into the gutter. Mr Thompson might not be fitted by background or temperament to edit the Daily Smut, but he has all the attributes to guide the BBC towards higher ground. And yet he does not do so.
Because he went to Oxford, church, loves puppies and no doubt does a lot for charity….Brand is patron, I think, of a drug rehab charity, so he’s obviously immoral scum and beyond redemption. And he has long hair and swears.
The French philosopher Julien Benda famously coined the phrase ‘La Trahison des Clercs’ - the betrayal of the intellectuals. He was thinking of French and German 19th-century intellectuals who had become apologists for militarism and nationalism.
A Daily Mail journalist quoting a bloke called Benda – snigger, snigger. But this is typical of his genre. Quote someone no-one really knows to give some intellectual superiorty to your argument and make it as tangential as you like. You know what – I don’t want to read French Philosophers and that does not make you more intelligent than me, or anyone else. It makes you look like a pretentious class-ridden snob.
The modern trahison des clercs is that of liberal intellectuals like Mr Thompson who can recognise goodness and truth but, out of fear of appearing judgmental or proscriptive, will not help others to find them. “
Or someone who, reasonably, is in a job where his morality should not be imposed on everyone else when it is funded by the spectrum of people in this country, not just class-ridden snobs who read French Philosophy to get their rocks off.
This moral dereliction amounts to a fatal arrogance. Mr Thompson knows why it is wrong to scatter four-letter words on television. He can see that the kind of humour purveyed by the likes of Ross and Brand does not raise people up but often pushes them down.
I’m getting over this class-ridden snob calling anyone arrogant. You are imposing your morals on everyone else. Who said you are the arbiter of morals in this country? Who appointed you as chairman of our thought police? Why do you think your sense of taste and decency is the one we all should have? Why? Because you think, because you can quote Benda and such like that you are above me. You can tell me what my poor fragile ears can and can’t hear. You know I think horror films are offensive and can’t understand why people would want to watch Saw. I’d never tell them they can’t, because they have a choice. You want to restrict choice. That makes you a fascist.
But, because he is terrified of being seen imposing his values – which are, in fact, almost indistinguishable from the old values of the BBC – he has so far said: let them have what they want. Then he returns to the books and music and culture of his pleasant house in Oxford.
Books, music and culture. Is this prick becoming a class-ridden snobby parody of himself? Do yourself a favour and get online and look at some porn sites. You might enjoy it. That would be so down and dirty and so low. You might get off on it more than Benda, get all guilty about it, and combust with guilt. Wouldn’t that be a loss to the world?
The greatest victims of this negligence are the young, as Sir John Tusa, a former head of the BBC World Service (one of the diminishing number of bastions of excellence in the Corporation) rightly pointed out yesterday on Radio 4’s Today programme.
John Tusa (Trinty College, Cambridge), so right up his street. Obviously, with that education, a bastion of excellence. It’s the class-ridden snobby upbringing don’t you know. And the BBC World Service is so exciting. When I listened to it on holiday it was pre-internet days so I could catch the cricket score. The rest of it was high-brow book reviews and tedious classical music concerts, with a smidgen of pop culture thrown in. Lord, if we had to put up with 24 hours of that.
The young, more than any of us, deserve guidance, and need inspiration. Instead, they are offered the sex-obsessed ravings of a pathetic clown like Brand. Shouldn’t they have better from the publicly-funded BBC?
Sex is dirty. Sex is immoral. Sex is filthy. My wife and I are class-ridden snobs and can’t understand how these ill-educated oiks carry on. The young, they are so vulnerable. If we just got them listening to Chopin instead of Eminem….
I’ll leave out the bit about the Archbishop of Canterbury who is timid because he’s a liberal, but a good man because he obviously goes to church. He should tell those African nutters where to go….
“BBC bosses were not able to see what was objectionable about Ross and Brand’s outpourings, but thousands of ordinary people, once alerted, could. It was the shocking realisation that many licence-payers had had enough – that they still defended standards of decency and proper behaviour – that finally jerked Mr Thompson out of his holiday reveries. “
BBC bosses thought WTF, probably. Why all the fuss? The key words here are “once alerted”. The Mail decided our moral compass had been disturbed and hit the roof. The Mail became judge and jury and got about 0.3% of its readership to ring in to say the Mail’s moral compass had been disturbed. Can’t you twats see the irony here. The very people offended were the very people who wouldn’t listen to this nonsense for all the tea in China. How can you be offended when you aren’t the target? Mock outrage is the curse of this country. We are so fucking gullible.
Another thing “ordinary people”. What is this amorphous group? Am I extraordinary because I think the Mail is a cynical hypocritical shitbag of an organisation? More class-ridden snobbery – Mail journos – extraordinary. Simple saps who phone in to do our bidding – ordinary. Twat.
“His inclination may well be to rehabilitate Ross – Brand, by resigning, would seem to have put himself beyond the pale – once the fuss has blown over. He would be making a great mistake if he did so.
He has commissioned a report, which he will deliver to the BBC today, but we don’t need such a document to tell us that both men behaved in an inexcusable way, and should not be employed by our public sector broadcasting organisation again.
Will this historic cultural victory stick? Yesterday’s Mail reported that, in April, a BBC1 comedy drama called Love Soup showed a woman being ‘raped’ by a dog. “
Historic cultural victory? Did this prick write this in all seriousness? I am about to explode in rage. Who the hell allows you to determine what culture is, you absolute rancid piece of shit? How dare you claim an attempt to emasculate the BBC and turn it into a censored poodle is a fucking victory. You, sir, are imposing your own code of morals on me, on the back of a class-ridden snobbery that should have been despatched years ago. I am not part of the liberal elite, in fact I quite loathe it. But I am not scum. I love my girlfriend (wife to be) and am monagamous towards her. I have a few foibles, I’m not perfect. I like to think I’m quite intelligent, but I ain’t going to patronise someone deliberately with it. I am loyal, kind etc. I like to rant, but my heart is in the right place. I can see how people might be amused by the antics of these two, and I personally dislike them. I’d like to see them get a good kicking to remind them not to take liberties again. But I am not going to tell people they can’t do anything. A kicking might be a bit old fashioned, and maybe a little to low brow…. But I will not impose my morals on people (the kicking is “tongue in cheek”). I’m sure there was much more to Love Soup than that particular bit, but I wouldn’t choose to watch it, quite frankly. There is an off switch, or are you to thick to find it?
“The BBC still pumps out many programmes that offend against decency and taste, and are often particularly offensive to women. We should not imagine that the tap will be turned off in a trice.
But, maybe the affair of those unfunny and grossly overpaid vulgarians Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand will show Mr Thompson and his senior colleagues that the BBC has become dangerously out of step with many of the people who pay its bills.
If Mr Thompson does not have the courage to act on his moral convictions, he will be wise to listen to the outrage of those who do. “
There you have it. In a nutshell. Class-ridden snobbery and morality. The Daily Mail is well served by your patronising presence. Get up against the wall…..
