Russell Brand quits Radio 2
Thursday, October 30th, 2008Last night hairy lothario Russell Brand announced that he had flown the coop from his Radio 2 post amid controversy over calls made to Fawlty Towers star Andrew ‘Manuel’ Sachs. It emerged that Brand had enjoyed a dalliance with Sachs’ granddaughter Georgina Baillie, and Brand, together with Johnathan Ross called to leave a message on Sachs’ answer phone; Ross is heard exclaiming “He f**ked your granddaughter!”, barely a minute into the recording.
In a statement, Brand outlined the reasons for his departure: “I got a bit caught up in the moment and forgot that, at the core of the rude comments and silly songs, were the real feelings of a beloved and brilliant comic actor and a very sweet and big-hearted young woman.
I have apologised to Andrew Sachs and I believe he has graciously accepted my apology. I have not had the chance to apologise to Georgina yet because I’m a little bit embarrassed and I thought I might make it worse.”
The phone messages were recorded last Thursday, and were broadcast last Saturday, between the post-watershed hours 9:00 and 11:00pm, and the story has slowly picked up steam throughout the course of the week.
Baillie is an aspiring model and a member of the burlesque troupe the Satanic Sluts; on the radio show, Brand described them as a “a baroque dance group”. Baillie said that “It was bad enough that they recorded these things on my grandfather’s answer machine but astonishing the BBC saw fit to broadcast it when they could have stopped it.”
Somewhat hilariously, Ross initially berated Brand for calling Sachs by his famous screen name on the first answerphone message, saying “don’t call him Manuel, that’s really bad manners.”
Whilst strictly not a digital TV story, the broadcast has sparked a large number of complaints to Ofcom – 4,500 at the time of writing – which sees it ranking highly among the other Most Complained About Shows.
According to Sky.com, the Jade Goody/Shilpa Shetty ‘Currygate’ still retains the top spot with over 45,000 complaints, with Jerry Springer: The Opera a distant second at 8,000. The 2001 BrassEye special rates at a mere 1,500 on the No Offenc-ometer, and, tellingly, Johnathan Ross scored a further 250 complaints when he asked David Cameron if he had ever entertained any sexual fantasises about Margaret Thatcher; a thought so vile that the Marquis de Sade, were he alive today, would probably vomit into his boots.
