6 Occurrences in the Last Few Weeks That Are More Interesting than Obama Beating McCain

1. Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross Have Their Balls Cut Off

...which would have been a fitting end to the entire saga. Nothing to do with Andrew Sachs or anything like that, just because they're both shit.

For the uninitiated, who have presumably been living in a cave, on another planet, in an entirely different solar system; Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, on a radio show, rang Manuel off of Fawlty Towers and left four messages on his answer machine, in which Russell Brand proudly declared "I fucked your grand-daughter." The show was pre-recorded but, somehow, the editor heard this and said "yeah, sounds fine to me." No-one really noticed at first until a newspaper editor with a lack of copy thst week remembered his niece telling him about it, listened, and started a furore. Now Russell Brand's resigned, Jonathan Ross has been suspended without pay, the Controller of BBC 2 has resigned / been sacked, and the beeb are wondering if iPlayer was as good an idea as they thought; the brilliant thing is that the phone call was initially heard by about nine people, but you can now listen to it, read transcripts of it, and get it re-enacted by a burlesque dance troupe called the Satanic Sluts. Even Andrew Sachs didn't hear it live, for heaven's sake.

Of course, having Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand not clogging up our airwaves is a clear cause for celebration. People felt an indescribable happiness when it happened, even before they knew why. Small children smiled. Tears of happiness ran down the cheeks of ex-SAS officers. Iraqi bombers put down their semtex explosive. Indonesians cheered. The world became, for a moment, a better place.

And yet, already we're "re-evaluating" the incident. There's been lots of horseshit in the paper about "edgy" comedy, about how far we can "push the boundaries". It's a bit like when Bernard Manning died and everyone started talking about him being a victim of political correctness, how Bernard was "controversial". The problem with Bernard wasn't that he was offensive, it's that he was about as funny as Schindler's List.

The point about the Brand / Ross thing is the same; it's not funny. If you heard two fifteen year-olds having a conversation like that down the back of the bus, you'd be slightly embarassed for them. It's a prank call, for fuck's sake. It's retrograde, boring, and just fucking pathetic. Credit where it's due; Brand might be a preening, self-glamourising twatsack, but there is a feeling with him that even he doesn't know what he's going to say next, and he's at least had the decency to resign about it (even if his resignation "speech" is so vapid and self-serving that you want to go after him with a baseball bat). Jonathan Ross, on the other hand, has spent years delivering monologues written by people far funnier than him; hosts a chat-show where he has matey dialogue with people he obviously hangs around with, and spends most of his time throwing innuendo at film stars (between fawning over them non-stop); dribbles idiotically on the radio once a week; and thinks that Rob Schneider's funny.

So, the frightening thing about this is that two crap comedians might be held up as poster-children for creative freedom. And already the lunatic fringe are creeping from their Daily Mail-lined homes to try and target stuff that's actually good. Alexander Armstrong has already got in trouble for making a supposed anti-gay joke on Have I Got News For You, which was so completely stupid it defied the laws of physics. Even the quantum ones I don't understand.

I'm currently reading a book called Belching Out The Devil, in which Mark Thomas reveals some frightening facts about Coca-Cola - not least that many trade union leaders in its plants have been killed by paramilitary organisations for making life difficult for the Coca Cola company. Whether you find him funny or not, Thomas has spent years being spiky, difficult, irreverent, vulgar, having a go at big targets, and never taking the easy option. This is a comedian who set up a fake stall in an arms fair as a PR company, and ended up getting an Indonesian defence attaché to admit to torture. Belching Out The Devil isn't perfect - why do factual books always have to be nine million pagest long? - but it's been years in the making.

Today, Mark Thompson - he's the controller of the BBC, a thoroughly different Mark - has issued a statement saying that "creativity must be allowed to thrive." If we've reached a stage where prank-calling a bloke to tell him you nobbed his grand-daughter qualifies as creativity, while Mark Thomas is largely ignored by the mainstream media, something's gone horribly arseways somewhere.

2. Tommy Tiernan Tells Jokes About Disabled People On The Late Late

Why the hell do Tommy Tiernan and the Late Late keep colliding with each other? Every time he goes on the thing, he causes trouble. He's been banned and accused of blasphemy after previous appearances, and this time he makes jokes about buying a motorbike at rehabilitation centres. With impressions. What the fuck does he get out of it? If you go on the Late Late Show, you know full well what the audience is going to be like, so - if you want to impress them - you'd just do that old material about Irish people starting a fire in a pub, wouldn't you? Like you did when you went on Letterman, say. When you were trying to become popular.

Here's the thing about Tiernan; he's pretty funny. Not hugely funny, but he can be quite amusing on occasion, and his overblown delivery does work (in spite of the annoying Oirishness). Ultimately, though, he's a very safe comedian; he's a fundamentally traditional Irish storyteller; he's every bit as twee as Killinascully. He's not happy with that, though - he clearly hates middle Ireland and hates the Late Late audience. In other words, he hates a lot of his own material. He wants to be shocking and tries desperately to be just that, but he's just not very good at it. He goes on the Late Late Show because middle Ireland are just about the only people in the world he can shock. Middle Ireland are still shocked by a dog that's allowed in the house.

One of the things I like about people like Peter Kay and Pat Shortt - yes, I do like Pat Shortt, and piss right off if you don't find the Jumbo Breakfast Roll song funny - is that they embrace their own conservatism, they aren't afraid to just be traditional comedy that your mum will like as much as you. Tiernan is the opposite. Whenever he tries to do shocking it comes across as a desperate attempt to be controversial. He has a routine about the 6 million Jews who died in WWII, in which he points out that it's a suspiciously round number. Well no, it's an approximation. Moving on.

Is shocking people really all that important? Well no, not if there's no other purpose. Ultimately, you can justify anything if it's funny, and Tiernan's "controversies" almost always aren't. Funnily enough, one of the best people to ever point this out was Tiernan himself, when talking about Andrew Dice Clay; "the most awful, retrograde, chauvinistic, unfunny excuse for comedy... you're shit." If only he knew, when he does impressions of people in wheelchairs, how closely that decription tallies with himself. It's not shocking, it's boring. Stop it, Tommy.

3. Raw Finishes

Yes, that is a sentence, not a type of varnish. Raw, RTÉ's latest attempt at cool-cutting-edge-drama-for-young-people, came to a close a while ago.

Unlike much of the shite that RTÉ has thrust our way since Legend finished, Raw was... competent. The performances were largely decent, and the script had some good lines. It was directed by Someone Who Knew What They Were Doing, and as such it actually felt like a proper piece of television. The downside was that all the characters were complete arseholes.

Really, all of them. I mean, I know we're trying to reflect the young cutting-edge nature of the Celtic Tiger, and I know that it's all about people who do drugs drink and have sex and stuff, but... do we really have to make them so horrifically unlikeable? There was JoJo, the drunken dullard who started fights with everyone she met; Bobby, the Englist dickhead who slept with everyone who could; Geoff, the loudmouthed chef who's essentially an Australian Gordon Ramsey; Barry off Bachelor's Walk, who's a Northern barrister and has left his wife for no apparent reason (except he's Barry off Bachelor's Walk, with a funny accent); some long-haired guy who runs the place, but ooh he feels so trapped and he wants to be free again, it's so difficult for him, aw, bless...

You get the picture. A bunch of whiney narcissistic spunkbubbles have sex with each other and do drugs. Now, it's relatively well-assembled in its own way, but what's it for? Why does it exist? What, fundamentally, is it about? It's not about cooking, or a restaurant; you get nothing from it that you don't get from an episode of Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares; and you don't care about any of them, or their sad little lives. I speak as someone who actually likes Charlene McKenna. Moreover, though, it's got no ambition beyond being young, and cool, and - that word again - shocking. But it's so conformist in its own way. There's the standard gay love story - because two gay people who work together will obviously end up fucking - which has a grotesque self-congratulatory aspect, as the Czech immigrant is shocked that everyone in Ireland is perfectly cool with gayness, and everyone applauds when the two guys get together. In truth, someone would be making a disgusted face and saying "ah, it's not natural." But telling a story about a homophobe might actually be interesting, so obviously it didn't happen.

Dammit, even Dan and Becs felt like it was about something.

We really should expect more than basic competence from RTÉ by now, even if it is a shock when it happens. Pure Mule was entertaining, with drink and drugs and horrible characters, but it was about something; small-town psychosis, flawed characters embroiled in self-destruction as the only escape from a smothering environment. Raw, on the other hand, is supremely pointless. We've reached a stage, with Irish drama, where we're happy if it looks like it's been shot by someone who knowsone end of a camera. Even with television currently going through a fairly soul-destroying downcycle, by now we've got to expect better than this.

4. The New James Bond Movie

Everyone liked Casino Royale, except me. Everyone's hated Quantum of Solace. Except me.

It's not brilliant, obviously. But this is what happens when film critics get it arseways with a movie; they just try and rewrite history, and pretend films were better than they were. Hence all the complaints about The Quantum of Solace; "the plot's a mess!"... no, it's tighter and more linear than Casino Royale, which wasn't just excessively labyrinthine (what happened to all that Ellipsis stuff at the start, then?) but asked us to believe that world governments send people to play poker with criminals, rather than levelling the house. The character study is better than Casino Royale, there isn't the same level of "ooh we must fight eeevil" soapboxing, there isn't any where near as much fetishism of consumer hardware, the film manages to navigate Bond's inherent misogyny, and it's actually funny.

Casino Royale was a film that tried to introduce "grittiness" into the Bond saga, and this shock-factor was what lead to a lot of people into ignoring the film's glaring problems. But... is "gritty" all that good a thing? Everyone seems to have automatically accepted that Bond needed to be toughened up, by taking out the gadgets and the world-destroying devices and the silly bad guys. But once you do that, aren't you just left with any other action film? Villains with their base in a volcano; giant space rockets which swallow other space rockets; enormous radio-dishes on Carribean islands; psycho-women who crush their prey to death between their thighs. That's what I want from my Bond movies, thanks. Not that Bond has ever been particularly good, but the camp and the silliness were the more enjoyable things about it. It's not fashionable to say it, but there you go.

Sorry, wake up, it's the twenty-first century now kiddo, and pleasantly silly spy-capers aren't what the public wants. What they want are fast-cut scenes where you can't remotely tell what's going on, and people talking very fast while they look at giant computer screens. So what's pleasantly surprising about Quantum of Solace is how well it balances these opposing forces. There's undoubtedly a sense that much of the globe-hopping plot is there for showing-off purposes, and many of the chase scenes (which aren't all that well-mounted) feel parachuted in. But the story just about manages to create a plausible narrative world, and the introduction of the Quantum organisation shows some attempt at building a new mythology. The film's main problem is the plot - it's inventive, but there isn't even enough of it for 85 minutes. But on the whole, this is much more mindlessly entertaining than anyone would have you believe.

5. Sarah Palin Falls Flat on her Face

No, this isn't a technicality. Nice and all as it was to see millions of people who had, for years, felt racially disenfranchised suddenly have a feeling of empowerment, the most heartwarming thing about this election was to see the Sarah Palin gambit blowing up in the cynical faces of those who perpetrated it. And oddly, those two are separate (if parallel) stories.

Here's the thing; she was (is) an awful human being, a thoroughly despicable person whose views are reactionary, anti-social, and just plain vile. Palin was selected by the Republicans in one of the more cynical gambits to grace politics anywhere in the world; it was essentially an attempt to graft the world of celebrity onto a presidential campaign. Ronald Reagan was the first president - well actually, the first major politician - to be defined in terms of lifestyle rather than policies. Since then, this has been the case for pretty much all the US presidents, with the possible exception of Bush the Elder.

Palin was effectively an extension of that "idea", if you can call it that. She wasn't picked to appeal to people, she was picked to appeal to a demographic; not with anything she said or did, but just who she was. Down-at-home family-oriented mom, a part of apple pie America, there to win over the hearts and minds of them thar hilbillies, but also pick up a few erstwhile Hilary voters on the way by virtue of her having tits and a functional womb. It's a reasonable tactic, but it presupposes two things; firstly that the person in question can look like they vaguely know what they're doing, and secondly that people are stupid.

So really, it's "people" - the ordinary folks on the street, if you like - who come out of this with any credit. America liked the cut of her jib initially, and wanted to hear what she had to say. After Katie Couric interviewed her, they heard; they were appalled; they wanted nothing more to do with her. The only other person who emerges from the What-You-Thought-People-Would-Vote-For-That affair with any kind of enhancement to their reputation is Matt Damon, who very politely pointed out the obvious; giving the nuclear codes to a woman who believes that dinosaurs were wandering around 4,000 years ago is nothing short of absurd. Who else?

The Republicans perpetrated the whole thing because they had no regard for the people who vote for them, and found that it blew up in their face. The Democrats took the relatively sensible line of letting the opposition trip themselves up, but certainly played media politics on the whole issue. The media? Confronted with a woman who believed in teaching creationism, tried to have books banned from her local schools, and doesn't think abortion should be legal in cases of incest or rape. So the newspapers go after her daughter for being pregnant. Or they take the piss out of her for going hunting (like 95% of the Alaskan population), without bothering to ask if it's really morally superior to eat the flesh of animals bred in captivity and routinely slaughtered. In short, any attempt to attack the woman came across as cheap sniggering from posh public schoolboys. Sad, pathetic little men.

And yet, when election day came, the American people showed that they aren't as stupid as everyone thinks they are. Hooray for that.

6. David Tennant quits Doctor Who

And didn't he do it well? Scoop another award, and then announce you're leaving. It's difficult to dislike David Tennant, and I'm not even going to try. Even in some of the worst stories of a very very bad season, Tennant's done his best to render them watchable with his performance. He's treated the role like a sacred trust, a torch that he's carrying for children and fans everywhere - well, he was a fan, after all.

But let's face it; it's a good thing for the programme that he's going. Tennant has, in a strange way, become one of the worst things that happened to the programme. He made it too easy for everyone; he always provided the writers with an easy option. Christopher Eccleston always made it difficult; he was brusque and intolerant, a man who dismissed humans as stupid apes, a big-eared freak who we first saw blowing up a building. Writers had to work to make Eccleston likeable. But Tennant? Tennant always thought his companions were brilliant, thought humanity was brilliant, had a working knowledge of Eastenders. Doctor Who has, over the last few years, been slowly collapsing into an inward-looking, celebrity-obsessed programme, just like every other programme. And while it's uncharitable to blame Tennant for this - let's face it, it's the writers' fault - the fact remains that it wouldn't be possible while Christopher Eccleston was the Doctor. The lead sets the tone for the show, and Eccleston patently didn't care about our obsession with celebriculture.

Having said that, we now have the lengthy wait ahead of us... and as everyone knows, the next Doctor is going to be a terrible choice and inevitably arse everything up, the next story is going to be rubbish, and it's all going to go horribly wrong. I could write about this at greater length, but I'll wait until the gnawing certainty of impending doom has subsided.