“He had full opportunity to learn the falsity of the maxim that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. Again and again he felt that a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with red cloak and rapier and a feather in his cap, or even a sombre tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost, would have been a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to watch. It was not like dealing with a wicked politician at all: it was much more like being set to guard an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child.”
—C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
The last time the British public were disgusted was October 2008.
That’s my theory, anyway. It’s probably not quite right, but if you’re going to make sense of history—especially recent history—you’ve got to throw a dart in the timeline somewhere.
October 2008 was when Sachsgate happened, an event I remember very clearly. For the unfamiliar: this was when comedian Russell Brand and talk show host Jonathan Ross, during an episode of Brand’s BBC Radio 2 show, left profane voicemails for the elderly Fawlty Towers star Andrew Sachs that discussed Brand’s sexual relationship with Sachs’ granddaughter. Public uproar led to Brand’s resignation from the BBC, and a decline in Ross’ relationship with the broadcaster which likely led to his eventual move to ITV in 2010.
The great British public has unexpectedly revisited Sachsgate this week, amidst startling (but unsurprising) accusations of rape and sexual assault made against Brand. In our current political and cultural spider’s web, it is hard to imagine a thread more perfectly placed than Brand whose plucking could cause consternation across the spectrum. He’s a former darling of the Left, turned online populist agitator admired by the Right, and yet still a household name—someone my mum knows about, who gets a mention in the Gavin & Stacey Christmas special.
I spent a lot of this week telling myself that I would not write a Russell Brand take. The main talking points have already been gone over by those more articulate than me. For my money, Sebastian Milbank has written the best overall assessment over at The Critic, and Tom Slater has given a succinct statement of the should-be-blindingly-obvious at The Spectator as regards the dangerous precedent of instantaneously demonetising Brand.
And yet my mind kept going back to Sachsgate. Why?
One strand of the discourse around the Brand allegations this week has been a reckoning with the culture of “the Noughties”—an era of forced, self-conscious edginess in the legacy media as it tried to compete with the emerging internet; an era in which lads mags and Page 3 were still commonplace. We’re now willing to draw a link between Brand’s alleged off-screen crimes and his puerile on-screen antics. The Noughties made something like Sachsgate inevitable, and the reassurance that the British public have given themselves this week is that a presenter couldn’t get away with such a thing now.
And yet: Brand didn’t get away with it. That is precisely the point. Sachsgate is not one of those things which we all thought was fine at the time but are horrified by now. It ended Brand’s BBC career and contributed to the end of Ross’, as well as that of Radio 2 Controller Lesley Douglas.
Sachsgate has occupied my mind this week because it seems like, despite being a product of Noughties culture, it was perhaps the last prominent British scandal which was regarded as scandalous simply because it was disgusting.
The substance of scandal today is almost exclusively the abuse of power. When someone falls from grace, it is now almost never because the public regard their actions as, in themselves, reprehensible and as indicative of poor character. Rather, it is because they have violated our new taboos around privilege, power dynamics, and toxic cultures.
Consider Matt Hancock (I apologise reader, sincerely, for exhorting you to do so, but gird up your loins and stay with me). In June 2021, then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock crashed out of Boris Johnson’s cabinet after a secretly filmed video emerged revealing him kissing his colleague Gina Coladangelo, with whom he was having an affair, in a government office in May 2021. The substance of the scandal had nothing to do with the fact that Hancock had cheated on Martha, his wife of fifteen years and the mother of his three children. Reportedly, after The Sun called Hancock the night before the story broke to give him advance warning, he raced home to tell his stunned wife and end their marriage, even waking up his youngest child, an eight year old, to say he was leaving. Yet none of this mattered: the scandal was that the powerful man who made the COVID rules had abused his position and not kept the rules himself. (One wonders if Hancock himself doesn’t quite this narrative himself however, intent as he seems to be on effecting his own endless Walk of Shame on British reality TV, first on I’m A Celeb and now by being battered by some scary looking blokes in Celebrity SAS)
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