Further to my last post about this, Russell Brand makes a proper apology to camera here. I can think of several politicians (amongst others) who could learn from it. He doesn’t mess about with words like “inappropriate”, which these days is used to describe everything from ironically referencing a passage in the Koran to trying to have sex with an underage girl1; he simply says that what he did was “wrong”. He tries to explain why he did what he did without excusing it. He takes full responsibility for his actions. He resigns.
Good on him. (I expect he’ll be starring in his own show on ITV in about six months, for about twelve times his current BBC salary.)
- cf the dynamic range of the word “militant” [↩]
I think you’re being uncharacteristically gentle here (apart from the last sentence, which I think is about the sum of it). “I got caught up in the spirit of the moment…” Certainly not my intention to embarrass Georgina”… “I didn’t want to apologize at that point because I didn’t want to be seen to apologize to the reaction rather than the event itself….. Now… I’ve got no choice”.
Not my idea of taking full responsibility. On the other hand you could have fun writing “taking full responsibility” apologies in this Brand style for Jonathan Aitken, John Prescott, Richard Nixon, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad……..
Uh-oh. Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age. Thing is, I’m trying to take Brand at his word. The last bit is perhaps my usual cynicism breaking through.
Well, the guy does indeed say at one point “I take complete and utter [sic] responsibility” and he does, in fact, resign, and he has, in fact, apologized directly to Sachs. Short of unshagging the man’s granddaughter it’s difficult to see how much more responsibility he could take. Again, I am assuming that Brand is being sincere, but those two things: expressing his remorse unequivocally and forfeiting his job promptly lift him above, for example, most politicians caught red-handed with a naked intern/brown envelope full of fifties/dodgy oligarch/signed copy of The Protocols.
But, but, but he’s resigned only from a little teeny-weeny bit of his job; a part that made him a mere two hundred grand or so a year. To be comparable with a resigning politician he would have had to have given up his entire meeja career. And his first utterances on the topic, before the storm really started to rage, were a bit of a give-away. After a half-hearted mumbled apology he asserted that the messages he and his chum had left had been “really very, very funny” which was clearly untrue.
Thing I can’t understand is why Wireless Two (aka the Light Programme) is trying to attract yoof. Bring back ‘Sing Something Simple’—Cliff Adams and The Adams Singers never said sorry to no one….
If a Minister gets caught doing wrong as a Minister then he should resign from his Cabinet job, not from his position as a constituency MP or, for example, from his six-days-a-year directorship of Amalgamated Widgets.
I’m with you there. His first “apology” was nothing of the sort.
Don’t get me started on that. I date the decline and fall of civilization from the dismissal of “Smashie and Nicey” from Radio One. Now Armageddon is upon us, as Radio Two has realized that hundreds of thousands of The Young People have migrated to a place where they don’t have to listen to landfill indie and coke-addled late-thirtysomethings pretending they are still down wiv the kids.
Hughes of course is right; Brand should not just have apologised and resigned, he should have disembowelled himself using a tanto, live on camera. This act of callous disregard for a woman – a shy retiring girl, I believe, who likes nothing better than to be a member of a group called the Satanic Sluts and whose reaction when insulted is to go to the Sun newspaper and Max Clifford – merits nothing less than seppuku.
Perhaps, as a gesture of mercy from the Daily Mail readers, Ross could have been allowed to perform the finishing dakikubi.
P.
“Thing I can’t understand is why Wireless Two (aka the Light Programme) is trying to attract yoof. Bring back ‘Sing Something Simple’—Cliff Adams and The Adams Singers never said sorry to no one….”
There’s still a bit of that on Radio 2. I know because on a weekday at 6:30pm it’s often a choice of that or a Radio 4 comedy. I generally opt for the Cab Calloway and Glenn Miller.
Now, I think all this faux outrage is utterly ridiculous and has been whipped-up by axe-grinding tabloid hypocrites. Brand shouldn’t have gone, Lesley Douglas certainly shouldn’t have gone, and I’m pissed off that I won’t be able to watch Wossy when I get in from the pub tomorrow.
But I would love to see Russell Brand disembowel himself on live TV. Or, even better, a live suicide bombing of the Daily Mail’s offices – then he’d die a hero.