Last updated 12:47, Tuesday, 04 November 2008

They were absolutely right at the BBC. The last week has indeed seen a voracious, ugly, self-seeking media feeding frenzy.

Jonathan Ross, left and Russell Brand

Should public service broadcast comedy be bravely dangerous? How far can a state-owned network go for a laugh? Are offensive presenters paid too much? Were Brand and Ross victims of a morally immature minority’s cruel vendetta?

And all that was just from the Beeb – a medium frenziedly feeding from itself.

On TV news bulletins, in radio chat shows and online, , self-obsessed navel-gazing and pompously-defensive whining went on interminably to drive a national news agenda that really should have been concentrated elsewhere. They wheeled out onto their own shows, for interview and analysis, philosophers and actors, media experts (from the BBC) and comics, friends of Brand and Ross and the office cleaners... then they had the nerve to blame the press for overstating their self-inflicted miseries.

No wonder it took them so long to act against two overpaid bad lads caught in the act of gross insult. Never happier than when centre of public attention, the BBC hasn’t had so much exposure for years. Why leave the party when the fun’s still running?

These truly are such smugly self-important people. So touch-me-not and better than normal life; youth-fixated, above and outside all accepted laws of decency; setters and fixers of their own confusion of rules, whims and – significantly – salary scales.

They just don’t get it. And frankly there’s no sign anywhere that they ever will. “The BBC has lost touch with the values of the people who support it through the licence fee,” David Cameron said yesterday.

“How could anyone who works at an organisation priding itself as socially responsible possibly have approved broadcasting the sick telephone calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand?

“It’s become bloated with many of its executives overpaid. Why on earth is the director general paid over £800,000 a year? More than 50 people at this great public institution get more than the Prime Minister.”

Mr Cameron said the BBC needed to stop squeezing and crushing commercial competitors, citing the corporation’s acquisition of Lonely Planet travel guides which he said threatened other publishers and its plans for online local news video which he said could hit local newspapers.

“The squeezing and crushing of commercial competitors online or in publishing needs to be stopped,” he said.

His comments fairly illustrate an organisation entrenched in its ambitions for monopolising every aspect of public opinion, from local gossip and community concerns in the streets of Carlisle to who is acceptable as a liberal, Beeb-loving citizen... and what is – or what is not – funny.

Last week a Radio Five news programme – news programme, mind you! – ran an interactive mobile text Q&A session, asking listeners to decide whether they’d be in the BBC’s Terry and June line or its Buzzcocks queue – the inference being, if you liked Never Mind the Buzzcocks, you’d no business criticising Ross and Brand for haranguing an old man via his answering machine, with two million people witnessing the grotesque, bullying harassment.

Out of touch, out of control and out of excuses for its excesses, the corporation has given up worrying about what people think of it. The BBC gets our money whether or not we like paying £6m a year to Jonathan Ross, whether or not we approve of paying £800,000 a year to Mark Thompson, whether or not we want to pay our taxes to an organisation driven by its own arrogance to put independent media organisations out of business, just because it can... with our taxes.

Since the BBC feels it appropriate to recruit for queues devised by their own thought police, here’s a little quandary for the laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank bosses there. Given the choice, would you rather queue to humiliate ethnic minorities, the disabled or the mentally ill with your cruelly targeted, intensely personal, barbed jokes?

None? Out of the question? Wholly unacceptable? Actually, I quite agree. But since when were grandads fair game for your vile, gutter jibes? Who in your organisation has decreed that for allowance of good taste, decency and treatment with dignity, all men and women are equal – but some more equal than others? And while we’re on the subject – who gave you the authority to make that judgement?

What a bad call it was to assume that we’d all find the thuggish behaviour of two idiots hilarious and harmless because it had been vented on an elderly man, himself a comic actor, who would perhaps understand why a bloke on an £18m contract would need to justify his existence by being hurtful.

It was a bad call, not only because Andrew Sachs is a national treasure, not only because the on-air lewdness involved his grandaughter, not even only because the obscenity of the presenters’ salaries entitles us – their paymasters – to more intelligently crafted comedy.

The worst of it was, as registered by more than 30,000 complainants to the BBC, an organisation we have been told to believe is our proud reflection of British life, standards of decency, good taste and fairness, made a call for the worst and grubbiest of youth’s volatile street culture and allowed the public humiliation and degradation of great age to encourage our approving sniggers. Only the hoodies and cheap bottles of cider were missing.

The BBC is wriggling still, twining about its duty to broadcast contemporary, edgy entertainment and about its burden of having to pay the highest fees for the lowest talents.

They’ve fined Jonathan Ross a little over £1m – which is meaningless unless we’re to be offered a licence rebate – are forging ahead with world domination plans to kill off independent news media competition and have now started rattling tins for their annual charity PR-fest, Children in Need.

Frankly, I’d rather trust my money to a Help The Aged Avoid BBC Ignominy fund.