Marina Hyde (Fans of the tame, rejoice – TV's Beige Age is on its way, 9 January) implies that Jonathan Ross was ultimately the victim of some kind of middle-class backlash; a triumph of conservatism over 'edgy' comedy.
I think she misses the point. This is not why I (and many others) complained about Ross and Brand. We complained because we felt passionately that, although commercial broadcasters may choose to entertain their audiences with bread and circuses, there was no reason for the BBC to follow in their footsteps.
The 'Sachsgate' affair showed that the BBC no longer felt constrained in any way by its founding charter. It became clear that a number of senior executives actually found the schoolboy antics of the two presenters very funny, and were genuinely astonished when many members of the public disagreed.
I don't think this affair marks the triumph of conservatism over creativity. The BBC has often been the focus of controversy, but its audience expects that this will be over issues of substance, such as the allegations of lack of neutrality over coverage of Palestinian affairs. Watching a middle-aged man deluding himself into believing he has been whisked back in time to the Lower Fourth, where he and his chum can fart, flick paper pellets around with a ruler, and leer at the pretty girls in the front row, isn't edgy. It's just plain sad.
Andrew Mayo
Cookham Rise, Berkshire
• The BBC has two sets of enemies, and Marina Hyde may be in danger of conflating them. One consists of commercialists who will hurry to employ Jonathan Ross. The other set laments the material only justifiable on commercial grounds which the BBC already carries. Sadly, radicals wanting to shock godly folk like Charles Moore are at one with the boys with a business plan who recognise the cheap and nasty and the synthetically exciting as big numbers. Money wants those numbers rationally – to sell advertising. The current BBC wants them too, and hires personalties you wouldn't want to meet on a dark night to get them. It meets charges of elitism and cultural subsidy with a pre-emptive flight from quality. Indeed some of its top people now quite love the flash and meretricous. Rather like New Labour coming to love the filthy rich, it's called trahison des clercs. I want a broadcasting service with the virtues of Hugh Carleton Greene's regime and Sydney Bernstein's Granada. It is the justification for the licence, but one to which managers on high floors and higher salaries are blind – dazzled by numbers!
Edward Pearce
Thormanby, North Yorkshire
• Look further into the BBC schedules and you find The Thick of It or Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe – programmes which could hardly be described as 'beige'. A simple fact seems to have been overlooked in the Jonathan Ross departure debate. Ross had become unbearably smug, wooden and simply not very funny. I for one will be glad to see the back of him – not because I live in Tunbridge Wells, but because there are better people on the BBC.
John Hayes Fisher
Tunbridge Wells, Kent
• This may be the director general's 'duck house' moment (Report, 9 January). To blithely compare his own worth to that of a county council chief executive, whose average pay is much less, is crass and insensitive. He is right that the BBC is not a county council: it does not provide key social services and schools that affect millions of lives every day. Is he seriously suggesting the BBC's director of audio and music deserves to be paid more than double the salary of my local council chief executive? The BBC needs to be led by a man with a firmer grip on the current economic reality, with rising unemployment and pay freezes. Perhaps Mr Thompson has provided a public service by highlighting the issue again; maybe he will follow some of his colleagues to the higher salaries and job security of ITV.
G Routledge
Tickhill, South Yorkshire
• Mark Thompson confuses being paid the best with recruiting the best. People who earn the highest salaries are merely the best at getting the highest salaries. Where has he been this last year?
Mark Doel
Sheffield
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