Feeling pretty disappointed that the BBC and JR have fallen out.
It says a great deal about the political wranglings that go on behind the scenes at the Big British Castle.
Regardless of the specific reasons for his leaving I maintain, the BBC is a weaker institution for having lost a genuinely entertaining, and eccentric individual.
What is unique about this man and this situation is best summed up by Caitlin Moran in The Times. For the first time on this blog, I'm posting the whole article in full. Why?
Well, because I feel like it.
He's going to be a tough man to replace..I hope someone at the Beeb knows what they're doing?!
Letting Jonathan Ross go leaves the Beeb weak and dull
That a chaotic popinjay became a lightning rod for the Corporation was unfortunate for them — and for him
Let’s get Jonathan Ross’s faults out of the way first:
1) He had Ricky Gervais on his show too much.
2) The constant banging on about sex to his female guests stopped being “cheeky” in 2006, and was borderline “bad uncle” by 2009.
3) Whenever there was an awkward pause in the conversation, he would lean on his desk and say: “You know, you’re really a very attractive fellow.” It was only really one up from suddenly screaming, “Look over there!” or sighing, “So — this weather, then”.
4) He really did have Ricky Gervais on his show too much.
5) He had that thing that so many precocious autodidacts have, of presuming that because you’ve got so far on chutzpah and busking it, that you can simply carry on indefinitely on chutzpah and busking it. Let’s face it — the lack of research he did on his guests was, towards the end, embarrassing. “What’s the name of the film?” “So — you live in New York, then?” A 20-minute interview consists of, at most,15 questions. “What’s the name of the film?” shouldn’t be one of them.
For the past two years, Friday Night With Jonathan Ross often looked like a show that should have been prefaced by the continuity announcer saying: “And now Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, where the dog has eaten Jonathan’s homework.”
6) Seriously, Ricky Gervais. I mean, seriously. They might as well have just put a sleeping bag and a Thermos of tea under Ross’s desk and have him sleep there. It would have saved on taxis.
But all this aside, Ross’s departure from the BBC is ultimately a terribly depressing thing. While no formal explanation has been given for his exit, the rumour inside the BBC was that Ross was willing to re-sign his contract but that the Director-General, Mark Thompson, refused to sign it off at the last minute. The theory is that the BBC Trust had decided he was too much of a liability after the Sachsgate affair (when Ross and Russell Brand placed a poor-taste prank call to the actor Andrew Sachs), and had wanted rid of him ever since.
There’s a Cameron government on the horizon — thought to have some pretty radical ideas about the future of the BBC — and the trust clearly didn’t want one of the Daily Mail’s primo hate-figures around, to be used as a stick to beat it with every time he made a duff nob gag.
The sad thing is that letting Ross go instantly makes the BBC look weaker and duller. For years, that the BBC’s highest-paid star was a quick, edgy, silly nerd-dandy, into Japanese anime and rackety new guitar bands, was a cheering thing: you can judge the strength of any organisation by its ability to take on board and utilise eccentrics. A corporation with more imagination and direction would have been able to correct Ross’s bad points, as listed above — half of them nixed simply by deleting Gervais’s number from Ross’s mobile phone — kept him on board, and continued to look like a confident and forward-thinking broadcaster. Instead, it seemed to let Ross indulgently flounder into his own weaknesses, and then washed its hands of him when the whole Sachsgate thing blew up.
Of course, the problem Ross faced as soon as he became the highest-paid person at the BBC was the childish belief in some parts of the media that he now “represented” the BBC — and that, furthermore, the BBC represents all of Britain.
While obviously a not-inconsiderable burden for any light entertainment presenter, this was a particularly unfortunate assumption to lump on to Ross, whose entire broadcasting motivation is to push things, subvert things and bring a bit of chaos.
This was why — in its pomp — Friday Night With Jonathan Rosswas such a brilliant hour of TV: celebrities who were used to a numbingly sanitised publicity carousel were suddenly plunged into a ridiculous world, run by some gobby macaroni with no real boundaries on topic or tactic.
What they said was less important than their reaction to the whole scenario. Some — George Clooney, Will Smith, Christopher Walken, Tom Hanks, Helen Mirren — seemed delighted at being able to come out and play. Those who didn’t want to play along — Nicole Kidman in particular — revealed themselves, in their shock and disdain, equally. I even know where Ross was coming from in the early days of his perving over the female guests: if you have some of the world’s greatest sex symbols on your show, it is instructive to see how they respond when some ludicrous, ultimately self-deprecating, man starts slobbering all over them.
He’s simply acting out the common man’s thoughts. Come on, Ross wasn’t trying to pull them. He’s not David Letterman. He was trying to startle them. He was trying to see their bottom-line — not their bottoms.
While the fortunes of Friday Night ... may have waxed and waned,Film 2009 was the work of a passionate geek, and his Saturday morning Radio 2 show was always, always a thing of light-hearted, slightly minxy magic.
Ultimately, Jonathan Ross makes things fun. His instinct is to amuse and, personally, I don’t care if he occasionally says inappropriate things or pushes things too far — there still aren’t half enough people in the world who wake up in the morning with the sole intent of making as many people as possible lean on the kitchen table, weak with laughter.
That a slightly chaotic, witty popinjay came to be a lightning rod for a whole tranche of issues about the BBC was unfortunate for the Corporation — and for him. After his £18 million contract, endless fretting pieces were written, asking whether the BBC should ever try to compete with ITV1’s salaries.
The real question, however, is “what would happen to the BBC if it didn’t?” If the only people who work for the BBC are those in it for the sheer love of it — those who would piously turn down double the wages from ITV — the BBC would rapidly become the middle-class liberal pinko panty-waist institution of the Daily Mail’s nightmares, and, I suspect, fold within five years.
Still, it’s not a question people will be asking any more — no one at the BBC will ever be paid what Jonathan Ross was, because no one at ITV will ever be paid the amount Jonathan Ross was. The bottom’s fallen out of the whole market. He was the last of an era, financially and, it seems, creatively.
The glaring lack of any equally starry successor to any of his shows — let alone someone who could do all three — reveals just how ahead of, and unique within, his peer group Ross still is. In the wake of his departure, it feels a new order is settling on the BBC — quiet, safe, bland presenters on modest wages with no predilection for manga, Bowie, flamboyant tailoring and telling the joke that no one else dared tell.
The long, dark, Narnian winter of Vernon Kaye’s supremacy now looms.
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