| Jonathan Ross's finest moments in clips As Jonathan Ross announces he is leaving the BBC, a selection of highlights from the broadcaster's careerHe was the BBC's highest-paid star – and at times its most controversial. But today, Jonathan Ross has announced that he will leave the BBC. So what will his legacy be? Here we look at some of his most memorable moments.No list could omit that message – including such gems as "He fucked your granddaughter" – left on the actor Andrew Sachs's answerphone during a guest appearance on Russell Brand's show. "I'm sorry I apologise. Andrew, I apologise, I got excited, what can I say – it just came out," Ross said. "You can't be blamed for this," Brand said. Wrongly, obviously. It might have been Brand that went, but Ross's reputation also took a massive hit.Ross opened his first Friday Night television show after his suspension with the question: "So, where were we?" And then, of course, came the apology. "I'm going to take this opportunity to apologise for what I said on the radio," Ross said. "Because being on the BBC and being given this level of freedom to communicate openly with people is a great privilege ... and in future I do intend to be more aware of the responsibility that comes with such a gift … I do apologise for any hurt or distress caused."The episode has come back to haunt Ross: note this awkward exchange between the interviewer and Hugh Grant (from 4.42 for those who don't want to sit through the puff for Grant's movie first) – and Grant's question: "Do you feel you've put all those events with the telephone call behind you?"Post-Sachsgate, the presenter was also accused of homophobia over an item on his Radio 2 show to win a Miley Cyrus MP3 player. "If your son asks for a Hannah Montana MP3 player, you might want to already think about putting him down for adoption before he brings his … erm … partner home," Ross said. Ofcom later cleared Ross, saying the comment was "clearly presented as a joke".Ross had found himself in hot water over his presenting style before his ill-fated appearance on Russell Brand's show, of course. In an interview with David Cameron in 2006, Ross asked the Conservative leader whether he had masturbated thinking about Margaret Thatcher as a younger man; and as presenter at the Q Awards in the same year he joked that Heather Mills was a "fucking liar" and that he "wouldn't be surprised if we found out she's actually got two legs". In 2007, he also angered the National Union of Journalists with a quip at the British Comedy Awards referencing his salary, that he "was worth a thousand BBC journalists"That reported £6m-a-year salary was for Ross's radio programme, his film review and Friday night television show. His interviewing style often splits opinion, with some finding him madly excrutiating (references to having sex with your grandma, for instance) and others seeing them as delightfully warm and praising his ability to ask questions others wouldn't. Here, Nicole Kidman manages to look both slightly appalled and slightly charmed at the same moment.Gwyneth Paltrow, however, was rather less amused by his proposition that he have sex with her because she was "gagging for it" in an interview in 2008 – and the BBC Trust wasn't very pleased either.Were you entertained or appalled by these Ross moments? Which others would you suggest?Jonathan RossBBCRadio industryTelevision industryTelevisionRadioGwyneth PaltrowNicole KidmanMiley CyrusRussell BrandVicky Frostguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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Mel Gibson feels sorry for Tiger Woods 'Why are we talking about this?' asks the gossip-averse actorPraise be. Mel Gibson has broken his silence on Tiger Woods – and it might not be the most enormous surprise to you that the actor and noted semitic war historian finds any focus on sinful celebrities misplaced. "I feel sorry for Tiger Woods," he tells an interviewer. "Why are we talking about this when we're sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan?"Wait – I think I know this one . . . They're behind it again, aren't they? "You've got this history-changing event going on," Mel continues, "and we're talking about Tiger's private life . . . It just drives me crazy."Please, don't make him crazy! It was only a few months ago that Mel lost his rag before the congregation of the $42m private church compound he owns in Malibu, after some of its 70 members apparently saw a discrepancy between whichever arcane version of the Bible they recognise and the fact Mel had got divorced and knocked up a trophy opera singer. On that occasion he threatened to shut the church down if they carried on gossiping about him, so who knows how terrible his vengeance will be if the Tiger-tattlers continue to defy his will?CelebrityMel GibsonTiger WoodsNewspapers & magazinesMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Gaga get Brit Award nod, SuBo snubbed LILY Allen and Lady Gaga snare their Brit Awards nominations each, while Susan Boyle misses out. news.com.au |
How satirist Chris Morris fixed his eye on ideology and bombers Best known for TV's Brass Eye and The Day Today, Chris Morris has made his directorial debut at the Sundance festival with a film about British suicide bombersNot so long ago, a suicide bomber packed his anus with gelignite, detonating himself in the presence of a Saudi prince. He killed himself, causing a degree of mess, but the prince survived. I recall wondering whether I should laugh at what friends referred to as the "bum bomber", and concluding that it was something Chris Morris might have dreamed up. In his forthcoming comedy, Four Lions, Morris does indeed depict the destruction of a sheep and a jihadi who stumbles when crossing an English field with a load of gelignite. "That's Fessal and the sheep," someone says, pointing at a plastic sack.Philip Roth once said that the extreme nature of contemporary experience had done the novelist's work. To say that I found Morris's film disquieting would be an understatement. I wondered whether it was funny, even when I did laugh. I also couldn't decide whether the effort wasn't somehow misguided, whether I shouldn't conclude, reluctantly perhaps, that some subjects like jihadism can't – and shouldn't – be turned into jokes.No one has yet succeeded in depicting jihadism outside the familiar grooves of journalistic investigation. The famous Danish cartoons caused much violent grief, but were also not very funny. Fictional treatments such as John Updike's The Terrorist, or Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, are written in a remote, academic tone, as if their authors wished somehow to clean up the subject by turning it into literature. Martin Amis's own novella, The Last Days of Muhammad Atta, depicts the World Trade Centre attack. Atta is suffering from acute constipation. This falls flat because the reader cannot really care about a jihadist's bowels.Morris's film certainly comes closer to success, but this may be because he has tried harder, testing the degree of offensiveness of his material on us. I wasn't sure how to handle a jihadi who discusses going to heaven with his nine-year-old son. And I had a problem with the culminating scenes when the boys, dressed in obese bird costumes against a backdrop of the London Marathon, finally blow themselves up in a series of explosions that look and sound real.Muslims will say that Morris has committed numerous sins against their faith (although he denies this) and there will be those who conclude without seeing it that, like everything else Morris perpetrates, Four Lions is trivial or misguided, or both. But there will be many, like myself, who remain perplexed, moved by some scenes, alienated by others, still wondering several days later what the film is trying to accomplish.Morris was present at the first screening of the film in London, before taking Four Lions to the Sundance festival in Utah, where it was screened last night. He made it clear that this was a serious project, long in conception. It is his first serious work as a director, and he doesn't appear in the film except when he provides a voice-over at the end.A friend who has talked to Morris says: "Chris has spent an incredible amount of time immersing himself in Islam, terror and counter-terror. He has toured Britain and met dozens of radicals, ex-radicals, academics, journalists, British Asians, has sat in on high-profile terror trials for weeks, read all the key texts and recent books, gone to innumerable public meetings, met with community groups, and made it his business to educate himself on the nature of fundamentalism. I don't know anyone who has spent more time learning and digesting these issues."A few years ago, Morris went to a lecture given by Martin Amis on jihadism in which the latter concluded that, "faced with Islam, even satire withers and dies". In the Observer, Morris took Amis to task for ignorance and complacency. The author didn't know enough to pronounce on such matters, he suggested. Instead of finding out about jihad from real people, he'd stayed in his study concocting fancy phrases. "The way out of this mess… is to clarify and discriminate rather than hurl abuse at anything that goes near a mosque," he said.Provocatively, Morris has chosen to locate his own story not amid alien souks or in aircraft, but in the familiar, banal terrain of British comedy. Barry, who is white, English and revolutionary, sounds as if he has strayed out of the kind of shows favoured in the early 1980s, when Robert Lindsay used to impersonate his town hall Che Guevara. But he isn't upsettingly real. His associates, played by young Asian actors, are by contrast wholly believable, because they are so normal. They make jokes about blowing themselves up, and so on. The only thing they fail to do is get drunk, which may be accurate, but feels like a rare Morris concession to correctness or prudence.What interests Morris so much about these characters? A clue is to be found in his parodies of popular television, such as Brass Eye. He is mistakenly seen as an obsessive interpreter of popular culture, au fait equally with its clichés as well as its casual, unthinking brutality. In reality, Morris is a puritan, exercised by the omnipresence of stupidity. Those who use the word "cynic" in the laziest way, as a term of approbation, tend to attach it to him. But there is nothing at all cynical about his work, which brims with restrained righteousness. Think of his most famous sketch, about the fictional drug Cake, or the programme devoted to paedophiles.Morris doesn't care much that celebrities, or indeed dim MPs, lend their names to stupid campaigns. He thinks that we should want to know the truth about such things. Plainly, we don't. Instead, we sentimentalise social problems. We're happiest with feeble gestures of pseudo-solidarity that require no effort and cost nothing. Unlike his friends or contemporaries, Morris isn't here to entertain. The spoof about Richard Geefe, the journalist who decides to kill himself because his career has gone badly (also published in the Observer), is a clever, well thought-out assault on narcissism. It proved to be offensive only to those who were taken in, believing it was real.In Four Lions, Morris wants to show that jihadists are like any of us, different only because they are caught within an ideology that encourages them to do horrifying things. The ideology is stupid, but it imprisons converts, forcing them to commit evil acts. Such people kill themselves because they want to kill us, because we're "kuffur" (unbelievers). Morris's proposition is an important one, too. He thinks that if we continue to treat bombers as aliens, rather than acknowledging that they are a part of our society, we will never understand anything about jihadism. And I agree with him.Within his film, however, Morris is hampered by his comic context. The characters look and behave like real people, but they have no depth. All his research notwithstanding, Morris cannot show us how or why they got where they are. This is why their exploits seem not humorous, or indeed serious, but just stupid. And this is how the film comes to replicate the Paddy jokes about Irish bombers that were so current when the IRA campaigns were at their height. I'm sure Morris didn't intend to achieve this sense of déjà vu. It also doesn't help that he is no great shakes as a film-maker (though he would be the first to agree).And yet on the evidence of this half-success, Morris remains one of the few contemporary practitioners of caricature in relation to whom the word genius doesn't seem inappropriate. After watching his film, I found myself thinking not of his friends or rivals, the Steve Coogans or Sasha Baron Cohens, but of the American abstract painter Philip Guston. In the Nixon era, Guston was sufficiently angered to break with a lifetime of sophisticated, somewhat anodyne shapes. Instead, he created giant, deceptively crude daubs – images of Klansmen smoking cigars, bloodied, bandaged feet, or portions of Nixon's instantly recognisable tangerine-skin nostrils and cheeks, also outsize.Guston's works of genius show you don't always have to be literal to express outrage, and that comedy doesn't actually have to make people laugh. Morris learned these lessons long ago, and they are at the heart of his best work. I'm sure he hasn't forgotten them.• Nick Fraser is editor of BBC4's StoryvilleSundance film festivalComedyNick Fraserguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |