Shameless?

Published on Tuesday 28 October 2008 18:27

IF YOU are reading this, you are probably a hypocrite. I am probably a hypocrite for writing about this today. But things like the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand/Andrew Sachs debacle – let's call it Manuelgate for short – tend to bring out the hypocrite in all of us.

Let's start with the Mail on Sunday, which kickstarted Manuelgate at the weekend with the headline: "How Brand and Ross left obscene messages for actor Andrew Sachs, 78 – and, of course, the BBC broadcast it as entertainment."

This, in case you've missed Manuelgate, referred to a Radio 2 show on 18 October, during which Russell Brand and his guest Jonathan Ross left a series of crude (but very funny) messages on the Fawlty Towers star's answering machine, suggesting Brand had had sex with Sachs's granddaughter (Sachs was supposed to be doing a phone interview, but didn't answer). Was this a shocking sign that no aspect of someone's personal life is taboo when it comes to entertainment? That comedy has no more boundaries?

That was the Mail's angle, except that it was, of course, doing the same thing as the BBC. If it cared a jot about the Fawlty Towers star, it would not have turned his humiliation into front-page entertainment, worsening it in the process. Most other newspapers followed its lead, making much of Monday's delayed BBC apology, but ensuring they also provided juicy, entertaining extracts from the messages.

The mainstream media have to do this. If we didn't, after all, people would just read – or listen to – those very entertaining messages online. In an age when all information is instantly available, it is pointless, and bad business, to get all coy. People want to know the details, because it entertains us to know, so we will get them from whoever is offering them.

Perhaps this is why so much has been made this week of Andrew Sachs's age. "I do not understand how anyone can claim it is funny or entertaining to do that to an elderly man," said MP David Davies, hoping to sound morally righteous. Why is Sachs's age a factor? Because he is frail? Not at all; he seems full of life, and is still working away in TV and radio (hence the interview with Brand). No, his age is a kind of shorthand; what is really being said is that an older generation valued dignity and privacy. Sachs, despite having led a public life for half a century, is assumed to embody that generation.

Which is why the debacle has mostly been presented as an attack on Sachs, rather than his 28-year-old granddaughter. As Sachs has pointed out, "that's where the apology should be directed; I wasn't attacked in any way". But she is considered irrelevant, as the transcript of the phone calls makes clear. Both Brand and Ross express mock horror at the idea that they've offended a pensioner off the telly, but the idea the woman would be upset is barely acknowledged. Why? Because she's young and not famous. Both facts, in this story, reduce her to the furniture of modern life.

Yesterday there were calls for Ross and Brand to be given the sack. This would make hypocrites of everyone. Ross and Brand earn the money they do because they are exceptionally skilled at turning their whole lives into a performance. They've done this in different ways. Brand has made a whole career out of his sex addiction, while Ross publicly parades his family life constantly.

Of course it's not that simple. Both are smart, witty, skilled and ambitious, but ultimately they are, like Victoria Beckham, Charlotte Church and, in a different way, Tracey Emin, a particular kind of successful modern celebrity – a freak show in which the freak has outsmarted the audience by taking control. They have not, like Robbie Williams or Geri Halliwell, been broken by their neediness for fame.

We are inspired by their strength and their shamelessness, in a heartless celebrity culture that eats people up by publicly shaming them.

But, just occasionally, they do something which reminds us of our complicity in all this. They forget – or decide they don't care – that not everyone lives their lives so openly. And instead of making crude, shameless (but very funny) comments about Simon Cowell, or the Osbournes, or other inhabitants of the modern celebrity circus, they make them about an old man from a different era of entertainment. And we remember it wasn't always like this. Don't worry, the feeling will pass in a moment.