By the end of October 2008 the prank phone calls made by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross had produced almost 6,000 news articles on Google News, Brand’s resignation, the resignation of the Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas and a three-month suspension for Ross. The coverage settled on one number, the 18,000-plus complaints, which was still rising.
A second set of reactions got much less attention. On BBC Radio 1’s online forum, and in comments on the BBC News website, opinion was considerably more divided than the national coverage suggested, with many younger listeners treating the affair as trivial. The BBC noted the split itself, saying “there is an alternative view we are seeing strongly expressed by our young audience which is certainly worth wider consideration.”
The comments themselves were blunt: “Everybody needs to calm down”; “It was funny, a joke. People are so boring”; “Leave Russell alone”; “Hey, they are comedians - it’s their job”; and “It’s been blown out of all proportion.”
The interest of the episode is less the row than the measurement problem inside it. A complaint total is easy to count and easy to report, and it captured one audience while the audience the programmes were made for was reacting somewhere the count could not reach.