Extreme measures

I watched Russell Brand’s Ponderland (Channel 4, Thursday) if only so that you don’t have to. It’s rather lazy, like the unpleasant message he and Jonathan Ross left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone and then broadcast on Radio Two. You’d think that if they were going to be offensive to a well-loved old thespian gent they would have laced it with wit — some tonic and lemon to go with the gall. In a gruesome way, what made it even more awful was the fact that Brand really did sleep with Sachs’s granddaughter. In the old days, a gentleman never bandied a woman’s name about. Now you can boast to her old granddad that you’ve shagged her, and tell everyone at home as well. I sometimes fear that one day, before too long, we shall see a spectacle like the end of an old Quatermass serial, as a terrifying phantom, a pillar of smoke and flames hundreds of feet high, forms over Broadcasting House.