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Media
Ross on Sachsgate and being happy to leave the Beeb
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 12 April 2010
Possibly aware that since announcing he was leaving the BBC those tabloid journalists who have always despised him have had less to rant about, Jonathan Ross has given an interview to The Guardian seemingly designed to get those tabloid hacks all angry all over again.
In the interview, he made light of the Sachsgate scandal, despite originally claiming to be sincerely sorry for leaving lewd messages on Andrew Sachs’ answer phone when he was suspended over the whole thing back in 2008. He told the broadsheet: “In a way, the whole experience has been quite fun. Because it’s been really odd. And interesting. And fun. Life can sometimes potter along in the same direction and then something comes along over which you have no control”.
He continued: “It was literally within about four days of it all kicking off that I just thought: ‘You know what, there’s no way I can control this, there’s no way I can change this. So I’ve just got to not let it bother me’. And then it became almost like I was watching it happen to somebody else. And it was quite entertaining. It was weird watching people get themselves into a lather over something so intrinsically unimportant as that. It was just silly. Silly people writing silly things”.
With Ross promising to one day give a full account of the Sachsgate scandal in all its “hilarious” detail, the tabloids obviously ran to Sachs to get his comment on Ross’s latest remarks. He told The People: “My wife and I shared an empty laugh about it. It’s a strange thing to say. It makes me wonder what the world is coming to. Yet it takes a lot more than that to upset me”.
Ross also took time in the interview to diss the BBC, though given it’s widely assumed it was they who let him go rather than the other way round once the controversial presenter’s multi-million contract was up for renewal, that’s probably not a surprise.
Ross told the Guardian: “I can’t begin to tell you the relief I feel. I don’t want to speak ill of people at the BBC because I’ve loved working there, and I still love working with them. But at the same time, oh man, I can’t wait to get out. I think it’s a shame that the people running it are always trying to second-guess what the newspapers will say about them – and whatever the next government we wind up with will say about them. The experience of being there isn’t quite the place it was. And it’s a terrible, terrible shame”.
