Tom Griffin (London, OK): Over at openDemocracy's 50/50 blog, Rosemary Bechler offers an extended meditation on the Russell Brand controversy and its implications for contemporary Britain.
Some would see the episode mainly in terms of the tribulations of a universal broadcaster in an age of fragmented audience expectations. Bechler concludes that explanation is not good enough:
No - the elephant in the room I would like to suggest, remains the sheer number of programmes, whole programming genres, and comedic, cookery and broadcasting careers which now have humiliation, harassment and bullying as their sole, or at least underlying objective. From Weakest Link to The Apprentice to Big Brother to all those X factors - the list is far longer than this - what other promise lurks in the bowels of British ‘entertainment’ so tantalisingly as our collective celebration of our ability to hurt each other? If OFCOM and the BBC Trust were genuinely to ask who is responsible for this, they would have to widen their brief to include the whole of ‘reality tv’ for starters – that marvellous phrase which seals itself with the hegemonic imprimatur. And would the true villain of the piece really turn out to be - the younger generation?
There may be some truth to the accusation that the brutalisation of doing business in everyday life in Britain in the last thirty years has filtered down to infect our children. (If so, it is the only area where trickledown has worked.)
