Adrian Edmondson, the well-known comedian, comments in The Independent on the Ross/Brand affair:
What the millions are really complaining about is Brand’s success with women, and Ross’s extraordinary salary.
I have to point out that until this happened I had never heard of Russell Brand, and I should be entirely happy never to hear of him again. His success with women has nothing to do with the fact that the state broadcaster paid him with public money to do something which, had any of the public tried it at home, would have got them arrested.
Ross’ salary is puny by comparison with those of certain bods in the City (or on Wall Street), and perhaps the Oil Ministers of certain Middle Eastern countries, and presumably certain sports ‘personalities’, none of whom I can even name, let alone bring myself to envy.
What matters is not what the wretched fellow is being paid, but who is paying him. I would not give a damn if Mr. Rupert Murdoch, say (though I’m sure he has more sense), were to pay him a million pounds a day for waffling incoherently into a microphone.
The point that Edmondson completely misses, in his wholly justifiable concern that ‘controls’ imposed as a result of this case should not restrict the scope of the satirist, is that everyone in the country (including those who do not wish to participate) is being subjected to the time-honoured process of ‘demanding money with menaces’ by the BBC in order to pay for these infantile goings-on.
The difference between real comedy, for which he is famous, and what we are seeing here also seems to have escaped him.
