The Faulty Towers

"He's from Barcelona". If you're too young to remember this catchphrase from Fawlty Towers then you're probably baffled by the brouhaha which has greeted Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross's faux pas last weekend. Or more accurately, Radio 2's faux pas. They employed them after all. What initially seemed like a storm in a teacup has now morphed into a public frenzy of indignation, egged on by certain sections of the press.

I won't dwell on whether Brand and Ross's call was "offensive". You can make your own mind up by watching it here.

It's a pretty rambling, incoherent and generally shambolic scene, interspersed with a few crudities that are pretty tame in comparison to a lot of what we hear on the box (or on the internet) these days.

What is more pertinent is what the whole saga says about British society.

When the show went out 2 people complained. That's right, 2. After a Mail on Sunday story of outrage the number of complaints rocketed to 30,000 . Why the snowballing outrage? It's because we're all sofa-bound judges now, and technology has empowered us to instantly register our outrage, at the click of a button. No need for posting a letter nowadays. I'll wager that most complainers haven't actually heard the offending prank. It just doesn't add up.

But add to the mix a few more combustible elements. The first is money, or more accurately, resentment at money. Or more accurately still, envy. We have to pay our licence fee under pain of imprisonment. And people don't like seeing their millions of their money going to people who annoy them. Because Ross and Brand annoy a lot of people. The mob love to see the mighty brought low, the arrogant humbled.

The feeling that we sit in judgement over transgressors is empowering and allows us to stare down haughtily from the moral high ground. Licence fee payers' resentment and irritation towards entertainers who grate on the sensibilities has finally found an outlet.

Self-righteousness has a symbiotic relationship with another two other quintessentially British traits, the championing of the underdog and the sense of 'fair play'. Andrew Sachs was an in a sitcom a few decades ago, where he played a fool who could speak no English. He is fondly remembered as that fool. He is almost a national institution and belongs to a different era. He is certainly not viewed as a legitimate target for ridicule. If Ross and Brand had chosen a Big Brother contestant with a big mouth who has made more money than we have they would have got away with it. But the public now views them as bullies, kicking sand in the face of a much-loved old actor. Wrong target, guys.

As for Sach's grand-daughter she's now sold her 'story' to The Sun, so embodying another feature of modern society, the fetish for self-abasement for money.

Now The Mail on Sunday seems to specialise in outrage. It seems to have a patent on it. If there were no outrage, the MoS would be outraged at the lack of outrage, other papers would pick up the story and soon message boards and inboxes would be full of outraged messages bemoaning the scarcity of Things To Be Indignant About. From Mr Outraged from Orpington.

None of us would like to see our elderly relatives publicly humiliated. What Ross and Brand did was ungentlemanly and some form of censure would have sufficed. If you think this is untrue, ask yourself if you would remain silent if your granddad was treated similarly. But this is now nothing to do with helping an old man up off the floor. It’s a reflection of the media-obsessed, self-righteous age in which we live, where the trivial is elevated to the important, where the media hue-and-cry can make people lose all sense of perspective and where the herd instinct of large swathes of the public says more about the state of this country than a few overrated comedians.