Ross and Brand - a gift to bloggers

What a subject for a blog on modern manners, Russell Brand the serial fornicator (I was tempted by the alliterative properties of another word there but resisted it) and Jonathan Ross the highly paid TV personality have got themselves in trouble.

And how we laughed. The so-called telephone "prank" may not have been funny but the sight of two well known people getting into trouble, particularly with consequences to their wallets, always amuses me. What about you?

Brand has just resigned from his £200,000 a year job on Radio 2. Yes, £200,000 a year. Way short of being paid like a footballer, but not a bad wage by most standards. Ross has been suspended for twelve weeks. If the press is to be believed this will cost him around the £1,500,000 mark. It will probably be a nice rest for him. He can write another book. Or plan on how to spend the rest of his wages - the £4,500,000 he will still be getting this year.

I don't know what you'd do with that sort of money. Presumably you have to hire someone just to look after it. Based on the way banks have been lending until recently you could probably take out a mortgage big enough to buy a county.

However, the question isn't really about the rights and wrongs of what happened but about what has happened to standards in this country. Not the standards that allow two overpaid yobs to ring someone and leave messages like that. We all knew what they were like, and carried on watching them. And because we watched them the BBC kept throwing money at them. The standards I'm worried about are the ones that allow us to watch the gradual decay of comedy into the realms of "prank calls" but then to suddenly become self-righteous when something like this happens.

I'm afraid it's my standards that should be under scrutiny. How about yours? Let's be honest, if Andrew Sachs hadn't played Manuel would there have been 20,000 complaints? I doubt it.