Time to grow up?

Jonathan Ross. Yes, heard of him. He's the guy whose Friday night programme tends to mark the moment when I go off to surf, to post to my blog, to visit Second Life. Not because I find him offensive, as a rule, but because unless he has a luminously interesting guest on his show I find him utterly boring. Not funny, not illuminating, not shocking. Dull. Pointless. Not worth the effort of keeping my eyes open. Not worth - oh, certainly not worth - the silly money he seems to be paid.

And that's the point, surely, behind his suspension over the Andrew Sachs phonecall

What problem, are you asking? Well apparently - according to Vicky Allan in the Sunday Herald - the furore (didn't know there was a furore, but there you are) over his suspension and the damning of Russell Brand shows up a deep divide in British society, between those who think comedy has to be edgy and those who think it has to observe boundaries. Or, as Allan puts it, the Youtube Generation and Daily Mail Morality. What's new? Look at it from a slightly different angle and you see a divide between those who think you can be as rude and insensitive as you like and those who realise that you have to take other people's feelings into account. Or maybe a divide between children and grown-ups?

For most of us who pay licence-fees have grown out of finding humour in the public humiliation of others. Most of us have learned where the boundaries lie and don't find amusement in crossing them. Russell Brand may be young - can't really tell with all that hair, but he seems to have a pretty face - but Ross is surely of an age when he ought to be a grown-up. And me? I'm old enough to be Victoria Meldrew.