It’s been a long time since Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand allowed their evil souls to intertwine and become as one behemothic being of pure malevolence.
Remember? They were hell-bent on destroying each molecule of moral fibre in the BBC by ringing every single one of our grandads and cussing them out. Of course, their reign of evil only lasted a total of one grandad before their demonic light was squished out of existence by the great indignant arse of the Daily Mail, so then we all kind of forgot about it. Until back in January, when J-Ross flounced out of the BBC’s disapproving grasp and into pastures as yet unknown.
And now, his end is near; it’s time to face the final curtain. And by curtain, we mean that scrappy bit of scenery perched somewhere in a corridor in Television Centre which we’re meant to pretend is a glimpse into a palatial Green Room, where his Friday Night With Jonathan Ross guests laugh and cavort and dine on fatted calf and hide mischievously under his wife’s remarkable decolletage, and then decide totally off their own back to cram themselves into one corner for the duration of the show. So, the guests on his final ever chatfest, after 13 years of showbiz glamour – they’ve got to be the best of the best, right? The creme de la creme, the most loved or most notorious stars of the moment? Right? Right?
Nope.
First, David Beckham, a man so utterly lacking in any charisma and pizazz that Ross would get the same response by just scrawling his blokey banter directly onto a River Island mannequin in a waistcoat. Beckham will presumably be there to dissect England’s recent dismal showing in the World Cup, but once you’ve navigated the tangled mess of “at the end of the day”s and “gave it 110%”s and called house on your platitude bingo card, you may as well have interrogated a sleeping kitten for a similar level of intellectual insight. At least then you’d get a warm fuzzy feeling inside and a YouTube hit out of it.
Who else? Jackie Chan? Only entertaining if he rounds off the evening by kicking the hearts clean out of three-quarters of the Poofs while playing Roll Out The Barrel with his nipples. And finally, at the request of La Ross himself, those popular hitmakers of the day Roxy Music, where the reanimated corpse of Bryan Ferry will assume a louche posture on a chaise longue and deliver controversial bon mots over the sound of hunting bugles and his posho son picking off the riff-raff with a 12-bore shotgun.
Admittedly, that sounds quite cool. Probably won’t happen though.
A wasted opportunity for Ross’s swansong, then. No confessional interviews with Russell Brand, who’s too busy “getting” to a “Greek” and renouncing his debauched single life for a debauched married life with mostly-nude popstrel Katy Perry. No chance to ask David Cameron if he and Nick Clegg have played soggy biscuit under Thatcher’s portrait in Number 10. No aggressive and sexually charged showdown with the ghost of Mary Whitehouse.
Come on, Jonathan. We don’t ask for much. You owe us for dressing up as Dizzee Rascal at the Brits and indelibly searing yourself into our nightmares forever.
You bastard.
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