CRUDITY IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST

Here is an excellent demolition of BBC “standards” in 2009.

In defending Mr Ross, then, and allowing him to be paid £18 mllion to ask questions such as whether the Leader of the Opposition had masturbated at the age of 12 while thinking of the then Prime Mnister, the Director-General considered that he was serving the sustenance of citizenship, the promotion of education and the stimulation of learning and cultural excellence: a misjudgment so bizarre that only utter contempt for the charter itself, corruption, delusion, stupidity or abysmal incompetence could explain it.

None of these explanations would suffice to justify his continuance in office.Mr Thompson, the Director-General, said that Mr Ross was ‘outstanding’, among ‘the very best’. He said he gave enormous enjoyment and represented good financial value. What good financial value is to a public corporation which is not profit-making he did not explain in detail; but there is little doubt one might be able to say the same of public executions, were they broadcast, namely that they gave enormous enjoyment and, being cheap to arrange, represented good financial value.

In the very week after his suspension, which suggested that he had been guilty only of an error of judgment rather than of something far worse, and which left him to scrape by on only £4,500,000 of public money that year, he again made a tasteless sexual joke. Speaking on air to his producer, who had claimed while in Spain to have been accosted sexually by a woman in her eighties who lived near his villa there, Ross said, ‘Eighty, oh God! I think you should, just for charity, give her one last night. One last night before the grave. Would it kill you?’ Admittedly in this case Ross did not know that his joke was about a woman who, as it turned out, actually existed and was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (of which sexual disinhibition is sometimes
a symptom). But he must have known that either she did not exist, in which case the joke was merely pointless and crude, or that she did, in which case it was likely to be
offensive as well as crude.