Aunty Bashing

The saga over the Russell Brand-Jonathan Ross prank callgate is another example of Aunty bashing by the reactionary press.

The show was broadcast on 18 October. Between then and 26 October, when the Mail on Sunday published its rant, there were just two complaints. Now there have been 30,000 complaints.

The Mail, and most of its readers, have a pathological hatred of the BBC. They are just using this as an excuse to give the BBC a good kicking.

The show was childish and not funny. Brand and Ross should have been sacked. As should all the editorial staff who listened to this recorded show and thought it was appropriate to broadcast. That should have been the end of it.

But the press have whipped this story into a storm, forcing senior people in the BBC to resign unnecessarily. The story has been all over the papers for days. It is the top item on the news. It has been greater prominence than the recession or the humanitarian disaster in DR Congo.

This has all the hallmarks of the Hutton Report after which Greg Dyke, the then director general of the BBC, was forced to resign even though it was the Bliar government that had fabricated a pack of lies to excuse the invasion of Iraq, not the BBC.