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For me there are two fascinating questions about the Brand and Ross debacle.  Why did they put out the show with the item in when it wasn’t live and why did the furore gather so much momentum in such a short time over a week after the broadcast?

Why was it broadcast?  Any fool could have guessed there would be an issue and there were some very experienced heads in the approval chain.  I believe that the reason for broadcasting may lie in the fact that by recording the messages on an answer machine the comments were already potentially in the public domain.   With the social web anyone can publish and Ross and Brand realised that.  By not broadcasting they would have acknowledged fault and the recording could still reach the public via the web.  The evidence might be there is in their comments in the a part of the programme that was edited out of the final broadcast: 

Ross: “let’s both put on striped t-shirts and break into his house, merely to delete the answerphone message - let’s see what happens. What could go wrong?” 

Brand:  “Nothing, literally, nothing could go wrong as we smash our way into Andrew Sachs’s house”

Ross: ”break in like cat burglars tonight when he’s in bed”

Brand: “yes while he sleeps”

They must have felt that they had escaped censure when a week went by with no outcry but the press got hold of the story when Andrew Sachs complained.  It might have ended there but for the intervention of the social web once more.  The recording appeared on YouTube and there have been a million hits - somewhat more than the average listenership for Brand’s show.  As the hits on YouTube went up so did the complaints.  A week after the show went out there were just 69 complaints to the BBC at the last count there were more than 30,000.  A coincidence?  I doubt it.

As “Sachs-Gate” rises up the BBC hierarchy, the whole Brand/Ross furore has been an instructive lesson in crowd psychology and crisis management.

On the first point, by yesterday morning 18,000 people had complained about the offending broadcast on Russell Brand’s show. By last night, when both presenters had already been suspended and Brand, ultimately, resigned, another 11,000 had added their ire. Why? And how many of them had heard the actual radio item?

Thanks to Wise Geek for the science bit, it might be something to do with “individuals adapting to the expectations of the surrounding culture…in order to identify with the crowd”. A bit of shared experience or, in this case, a collective moan. It’s certainly a phenomenon that’s playing out in social media situations and shows how a poor response to a crisis can escalate.

It took the BBC from Sunday, when the story broke, to yesterday for the Corporation to act decisively. A Sun journalist I spoke to last night suggested it was the worst example of crisis comms he’d seen. If the BBC had apologised and suspended them both straight away, he felt, the story would have died and each presenter could have carried on as before, though probably wiser to the boundaries of public taste.

The old wag, John Cleese - no stranger to media controversy affecting comedians - says in today’s Times: “It’s important to hire people with enough taste to censor  themselves. I thought Jonathan Ross had that.”

Against my better judgement I listened to the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand radio debacle, not on the radio you understand but on Youtube.  To put this in context I should say that the Jonathan Ross show on Friday night is one of my few ‘appointments to view’ on tv these days.  I’m not a big fan of Russell Brand - he’s very clever, I like reading his column in The Guardian but I find him almost impossible to listen to. 

If  you are new to this story, on Brand’s Radio 2 Saturday night show, Ross and Brand left a string of offensive answerphone messages for 78-year-old Fawlty Towers star, Andrew Sachs.  They claimed, using slightly more direct language, Brand had slept with Mr Sachs’ 23-year-old granddaughter.What I heard of the excerpts from Brand’s radio show was not what I’d expected.  We expect the f-word from both Ross and Brand and that’s fine, we want sharpness but what I heard was akin to bullying.  What was really embarrassing was that it sounded very much like they were trying to outdo each other in terms of shock value.   It felt very much like Ross (47) was trying too hard to hold onto his crown as the emperor of edge and that’s just well…not at all cool. 

We want Jonathan Ross to be cool.  That’s part of his brand and we all pay a lot of money for it and I’m not sure I want to any more.