The BBC is self-destructing

There are still 27 people left in the British Isles – at the time of writing – who are unaware of the name of the BBC presenter who allegedly paid a teenager lots of money to look at pictures of their bottom and so on. Some of them are on the remote windswept island of Foula, I believe. The rest are members of the chap’s family.

I quite envy those who have not yet been told via that conduit for concentrated human misery, social media. There was a rather wonderful couple of days when the name was unknown and we had to guess, which was done, universally, with a sort of untrammelled, lascivious glee. ‘Please let it be…’ formed the preamble to every stab in the dark. I totted up the names of the (troubled? Vulnerable? Disgraced? Vile? Pick your favourite red-top epithet) presenters other people wanted it to be and while Rylan Clark and Graham Norton got the nod many times, Gary Lineker was way out in front. It never seemed likely to me, even before Lineker issued a very swift denial – much as did Clark. Poor old Jeremy Vine and the blameless Nicky Campbell also saw their names in the frame and raged about the ‘sewage’ emanating from social media. Well, sure, so what’s new? Social media is the rest of us and sewage is, unfortunately, what we do. Such was the antipathy to many of these names that I suspect even when the curtain is finally lifted, those who have had their hopes dashed will continue to believe that their own personal bête noire did the same sort of thing too and probably worse and it almost certainly involved goats as well.

It all leaves the BBC looking somewhat troubled.