I don’t think anyone has come out looking good from the whole episode. Brand (who I like) and Ross (who I’m not quite so keen on) both look ridiculous after that silly stunt. The BBC responded bizarrely to the whole episode and did nothing to suggest it knows its arse from its elbow. Meanwhile, the 30,000 people who didn’t hear the show but still complained to the Beeb that they have no sex lives (come on, that was the subtext of their cry for help!) look like even bigger muppets than they did before.

One of the strangest responses to all this has been the way that many commentators have begun to hark back to a supposedly golden era of broadcasting, an era personified by Michael Parkinson. Give me a break. Parkinson is the show that Billy Connolly used to launch his career using a joke about murdering his wife and using her backside to park his bike on. Parky loved that joke and laughed his face off at it.

But then this is the same host that positively groveled over wife-beater and serial cheat George Best during his countless appearances on the show. “Go on, tell us that story about the Miss World contestant and the guy in the hotel. Pleeease! Just one more time!” Another regular guest was Muhammad Ali who divorced his first wife because she wouldn’t go along with his Islamic demands over her dress code. Nice.

It was always a bit of a boy’s club on Parkinson. My point is, though, that if Russell Brand appeared on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross and made a joke about murdering his wife, you can only imagine the shrieks of horror that would come from the mouths of the very people who hold Michael Parkinson up as some sort of moral example.