Age of infantilism: Why the BBC has been too scared to pull the plug on Jonathan Ross's 'edgy comedy' As the great man himself wrote: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.'
In a week when the BBC should have been celebrating the success of its superb new Charles Dickens adaptation, two artful dodgers played one cruel trick too many.
As a direct result, the talented controller of Radio 2 has resigned, the case for the licence fee is once more under scrutiny and Jonathan Ross's career is hanging by his Little Dorrit.
The BBC's most expensive star of all time is suspended for 12 weeks without pay, a saving so significant that the BBC could afford to launch a one-man mission to Mars. How about sending Russell Brand?
Despite all of the above, Jonathan Ross will be missed by millions of viewers and listeners.
I used to be a fan of Ross's Friday night BBC One chat show. At least, I was a fan of the man who, at his best, combined shrewd critical appreciation with a twinkly mischief that could make a winter night seem less dark.
What I will not miss is the Mid-Life Crisis Ross.
The one who has been acting like an increasingly desperate, leery uncle at a wedding hoping to get off with the chief bridesmaid. Lately, no female guest has been safe from his creepy advances.
He told Nigella Lawson that she was a Milf (Mum I'd like to *******).
A formal complaint was made about that programme, but the BBC's editorial standards committee cleared Ross of breaching standards.
Of course they did. However low Ross went, the standards bar was adjusted accordingly to suit the BBC's favoured son.
A bewildered, icily polite Gwyneth Paltrow, who had just survived the rigours of natural childbirth, had to put up with Ross asking if she planned to have sex again soon.
The paunchy host eagerly volunteered himself.
'If you want to have sex I'll phone my wife. If she gave me permission, I would ******* you, yes.
'Because you're so nice and, really, you're gagging for it.'
If Jonathan Ross tried that on the street, it would be called sexual harassment.
BBC senior managers should have awoken from their complacent slumber when Ross's mate and Hampstead neighbour, Russell Brand, appeared on the show back in April.
The pair joked about Brand having sex with Ross's young daughter and his pets. Ross told Brand he looked like a *******.
There were gasps from the audience, but the two overgrown lads continued their merry sexist banter - safe in the knowledge that their 'edgy comedy', or filth as it used to be called, would be indulged by a BBC which seemed to regard Ross and Brand as boisterous, lovable puppies.
Oh dear, they will have the occasional little accident on the carpet, won't they?
Well, now the pampered pups have had the poop accident from hell. And the stain on the corporation's reputation could take months, if not years, to get out.
Larking about on a Radio 2 show, Ross and Brand played a repulsive prank on Andrew Sachs, the veteran star of Fawlty Towers.
Picture the scene. The 78-year-old actor gets home after walking the dog to find four messages on his answerphone.
In the first message, a sniggering Ross eggs Brand on to more innuendo and bellows across the studio: 'He ********* your granddaughter!'
Brand rang back to apologise, but added insult to injury by naming Georgina Baillie, Sachs's granddaughter, who is an exotic dancer.
Next came the cringemaking confession that Brand had used a condom and - sensitive readers please look away now - Ross and Brand suggested breaking into Sachs's house to perform a sex act on him.
Thank God Lord Reith, the founding father of public service broadcasting, is in his grave, for that last detail would surely have killed him.
Was it all a publicity stunt for Ross's autobiography, titled with horrible prescience, Why Do I Say These Things? If it was, it backfired spectacularly.
In the past, the pair had always got away with lewd jokes among their peer group.
But this was an old man being forced to hear excruciating details about his granddaughter's sex life.
Two top BBC stars were using a national radio station to embarrass and humiliate a person who deserved only affection and respect. And we were picking up the bill.
As a child, Andrew Sachs and his family fled as Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.
Seventy years later, Andrew was being persecuted again, this time by arrogant prats who considered he was fair game because of his granddaughter's racy lifestyle.
So far, so juvenile and depressing. But was that really enough to account for the media storm that blew up?
Only two complaints were received after the original broadcast. Yet by yesterday that had risen to more than 30,000.
A typhoon of public indignation blasted the bird's nest-haired Brand off his perch.
Lesley Douglas, the controller who rescued Radio 2 from the nursing home and made it the most popular station in Britain, had resigned to protect junior staff.
The BBC, meanwhile, had been criticised by the Prime Minister, the leader of the Opposition and Janet Street-Porter.
Blimey. When Janet, the architect of witless Yoof TV, says she thinks that TV standards have fallen dangerously low, then we really do need to start worrying.
So is the row just 'synthetic anger' whipped up by the BBC's 'usual critics', as the editor of Radio 1's Newsbeat claimed?
Or does it reflect public anger at a deeper cultural malaise? Not just two foolish and decadent broadcasters, but a decadent and foolish system that didn't even try to stop them.
The global financial meltdown, which Ross and Brand managed to bump from the front pages, undoubtedly played a part in their downfall.
Even when the good times were rolling, Jonathan Ross's £18 million for a three-year deal was enough to make City slickers choke on their Bollinger.
Now the Age of Excess has well and truly hit the buffers. People feel disgusted and afraid. And who should pipe up at this precise moment but Mr 16-grand-a-day Ross.
Was he using that public money to uphold the highest standards of the BBC?
No, he joined wits - if it can be dignified as such - with his mate Russell in an orgy of self-congratulation to humiliate a performer who had played a key part in one of the monuments of British comedy.
Fawlty Towers was also about embarrassment and humiliation and shame. But John Cleese and Connie Booth famously worked on each script for months until they were word-perfect.
The comedy they produced will stand the test of time: Fawlty Towers and the blissfully clueless Manuel ('Que?') will last for as long as there are humans who need to laugh.
The contrast with Ross and Brand's disposable, stream-of-unconsciousness smut could not be more painful.
For someone who costs so much, Jonathan Ross can be horribly cheap.
At the British Comedy Awards last December, a cockily unrepentant Ross quipped: 'I'm worth a thousand BBC journalists.'
The newsroom at TV Centre was then facing the loss of 2,500 jobs.
Such monumental tactlessness could not long go unpunished. With Britain in recession, Ross's obscene annual £6 million salary can no longer be tolerated.
Not when it could pay for a whole series of the glorious Cranford, or when the BBC's acclaimed Natural History Unit has had its budget slashed by a third.
While bankers were taking more and more outrageous risks with our money, and being lavishly rewarded for that recklessness, so were performers like Brand and Ross.
Don't we all feel a bit stupid that we let them get away with it for so long?
Another key factor here is the BBC's obsession with youth.
I have lost count of the producers in their 40s and 50s who have told me they are looking for another career.
A friend who tried to get a series made on a family subject found herself pitching the idea to 29-year-old commissioning editors who were invariably single, childless and often gay.
Nothing wrong with that per se. But those individuals hardly reflect the views of the majority who actually watch the box every night.
Can you blame the public for being furious with Brand-Ross when their motto seems to be: 'We make the programmes we like, you mugs pay for them.'
One gifted BBC producer, who resigned recently, emailed me: 'Television is not for you these days if you can't self-shoot and self-edit in an incredibly short time with no budget and if you aren't 12 years old.
'Sorry if I sound ageist, but they are bloody ageist.'
Nic Philps, the producer of that notorious Russell Brand show, is 25 years old. Barely out of nappies, Mr Philps was unlikely to have been able to control potty-mouthed giant egos like Ross and Brand.
Quite frankly, I wonder whether he would even have been bothered by what Director-General Mark Thompson called 'a gross lapse of taste'.
In the recording of Ross and Brand leaving their cruel messages for Sachs, you can actually hear the studio staff cracking up as the jokes go too far, and then go much further.
An older, wiser head would have chucked a bucket of cold water over the filthy pair.
But these days at the BBC an older, wiser producer is likely to have been forced into early retirement.
Barry Cryer, the well-loved veteran comic and a close friend of Sachs, says that the panellists on Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue always larked about and pushed the limits during the recording of the show.
Their experienced producer would then say: 'That worked in the mood of the moment, but it's not suitable for broadcast. I'm cutting it out.'
Would that such a person had had his firm hands on the reins of the prancing elf Russell Brand.
If you let a kid run the show is it any surprise when it deteriorates into playground bullying?
Perhaps the most worrying thing about this debacle was the way this scandal highlighted a frightening divide between the generations.
There are those of us who were upset by the sheer unkindness of Andrew Sachs's tormentors and even more staggered by the subsequent decision by highly-rewarded executives to broadcast the show.
Interviewed for their thoughts on the whole affair, the youngsters queuing to see a recording of BBC Two's laddish Never Mind The Buzzcocks didn't see the problem.
They told a reporter that they thought the Ross-Brand tape was absolutely hilarious. Like Nic Philps, those viewers belong to the MySpace and blogging generation.
They have been raised on a culture of unedited speech where you can say any damned thing you like and no one will cut it. So was Georgina Baillie, Mr Sachs's granddaughter.
On MySpace, the 23-year-old lists her marital status as 'Swinger' and says: 'I like to party, I don't care if you call me a waster or even a "groupie" because I'm having more fun than you and living this way makes me happy.'
This is what Noel Gallagher calls the 'Them and Us' divide.
A friend of Brand's, the Oasis star told Radio Ulster: 'At worst, it was a juvenile prank that wasn't unfunny - but it's hardly offensive.'
Compare that with this solemn rebuke from the Archbishop of Canterbury: 'I'm astonished that any editor gave the go-ahead to this disgusting and pathetic infantilism.
'Have we really got to this point of humiliation as entertainment? Why do we reward so colossally this toxic immaturity?'
The answer, Archbishop, is that the BBC rewards it because it thinks it pays.
And it is scared stiff of upsetting Brand and Ross, the most popular boys in the playground.
It's the reason why, when Jonathan Ross asked David Cameron if had ever 'had a w***' over a poster of Margaret Thatcher, the Tory leader didn't slap him down, but bore that disgusting question with an embarrassed smile.
Politicians are scared of seeming stuffy and out of touch. So are broadcasters.
That's why the humiliation of Andrew Sachs was allowed onto the airwaves.
No one wanted to be the spoilsport grown-up who said: 'Sorry, boys. It isn't clever and it isn't funny.'
Holed up in his Hampstead study with his collection of vintage comics, Jonathan Ross will have plenty of time to reflect on how one of the most entertaining broadcasters of his generation came to immature into a dirty old man making nuisance calls to a great comic actor.
It's not too late for Ross to grow up, but he shouldn't expect a call to replace Terry Wogan on the breakfast show any time soon.
Thirty years ago, Private Eye lampooned the BBC's motto, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation, altering it to 'Moron Shall Speak Unto Moron'.
Over the coming months, the BBC is going to have to work hard to convince the people who give it £3 billion a year that they are no longer going to fund a culture of blokeish coarseness that degrades the ideal of public service broadcasting.
The puppies need to be toilet trained. The age of the over-sexed, overpaid moron should be declared over.
As someone who treasures the BBC and the great contribution it can make to the life of our country, I hope it turns out to be on the side of Us not Them.
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