Can someone explain the joke? Seriously. There is the chance, I�ll grant, that my sense of humour is less sophisticated than it might be. I tend to laugh at people who laugh at Russell Brand.

Can someone explain the joke? Seriously. There is the chance, I'll grant, that my sense of humour is less sophisticated than it might be. I tend to laugh at people who laugh at Russell Brand. Those who tell me that Jonathan Ross is the last word in entertainment rarely seem to know many words. But I confess: if abusive phone calls are now Wildean drolleries, if harassing an elderly man is wit of which Bill Hicks would have been proud, I'm missing something.

Worse, I'm agreeing with the Daily Mail. Once they have done apologising to Andrew Sachs, Brand and Ross can apologise to me, and to a lot of other people, for that unprecedented event. "Sack them," demanded the voice of the self- righteous yesterday morning. It seems reasonable. I might even term such an outcome comical, or perhaps just one of fate's little pranks.

Comedy, as the pair would probably tell you, is all about taking risks. Not war-zone risks, obviously; not a firefighter's risks or a lifeboat crew's risks. Not risks to life and limb or even, perish the thought, to a £6m contract. Instead, when your ego becomes elephantine, you regard cruelty as a celebrity perk and tell yourself that preening self-indulgence is "risky". Or, worse, "edgy".

Presumably, then, it takes only the bravest sort of comedy genius to leave messages on the answering machine of a 78-year-old man boasting that you have had sex with his granddaughter. Clearly, you do not avoid the expletive. Then, for encore, you tell two million listeners that Mr Sachs will surely want to kill himself, to hang himself, as a result. My question: what if he had?

Yesterday, members of the Commons culture select committee wanted to know what had become of BBC "procedures" in the handling of what was, after all, a pre-recorded broadcast. I don't. Ofcom was launching an investigation to decide whether its guidelines had been breached. I don't care. The BBC had embarked on an internal inquiry as complaints approached the 5000 mark. So what? None of the facts is in doubt. There are no arguments worth the name.

Mr Sachs could, if he wished, reject the BBC's apology and pursue the matter with the "editorial complaints unit". If its findings are not to his liking, he could then "appeal" - arrogance cleaves to the quasi- judicial, one finds - to the BBC Trust. I wouldn't bother. Harassment and abusive phone calls are each subject to law. Personally, I'd call the cops, and see where that leaves a ponderous corporation inquiry.

Meantime, the rest of us are entitled to wonder why the BBC has hesitated. Because Ross and Brand are too "valuable"? At a guess, it was that unjustified sense of worth that encouraged the pair to believe, in their celebrity bubble, that they could do as they pleased. Gauge their attitudes: at no point were they concerned in the slightest about consequences. They have been, in the proper sense of the phrase, spoiled rotten, and at the licence-payers' expense.

The late Kenny Everett was once sacked instantly by the BBC for making a harmless little joke about a transport minister's wife and a driving test. More recently, the corporation mislaid both a chairman and a director-general over little matters of life, death, illegal wars and lying politicians. Yet at the time of writing, the present DG, Mark Thompson, has not even offered an opinion concerning the behaviour of Brand and Ross. There is something wrong with the BBC itself.

A pair of self-obsessed bullies laughing at their own obnoxious jokes are bad enough, but also emblematic. Ask about the abuse of licence (both senses) by Ross and Brand and you wind up wondering just how many of the BBC's star presenters will have enjoyed pointless trips to America before the US elections are complete. Fret over the millions spent on talentless oafs and you begin to fret over the millions lavished on relentless corporate branding, damned dancing hippos and all.

Each time I write about the BBC I find myself defending the licence fee. That won't change: all the alternatives are worse. But I'm not sure that I can endure the sheer puerility of the Six O'Clock News for much longer. Schedules stuffed with soaps and talent contests, breakfast shows aimed at 10-year-olds, BBC programmes endlessly plugging BBC programmes: I'm paying for this? And that's before the adverts proper.

But surely the corporation is spared the taint of advertising? Wasn't it public service purity that once caused Woody Allen - he used to be something in the comedy line - to insist that his movies should only be shown on the BBC? These days there is not a single spare moment between programmes that is not consumed with two, three or four adverts for BBC programmes. Cross-promotion is one, dubious thing, but in commercial terms the time is worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Daily the corporation is destroying its own arguments.

Arrogance caused Ross and Brand to skip merrily over the line between comedy and cruelty. A similar arrogance has become institutionalised within the BBC. Andrew Neil trivialises politics at will while elsewhere conducting a career that sits oddly with notions of impartiality. Online, the BBC is pursuing an "ultra-local" news strategy without a thought for all the local newspapers it will destroy. BBC Worldwide - you pay for it, but never see it - is busy taking stakes in independent producers and making a mockery of competition.

The only response to all of this is: why? The only answer forthcoming: because the BBC can. And it can grant bloated contracts to a Ross, a Brand or a Graham Norton because the licence fee allows it to "compete" while providing full protection from real competition. Its reward, a symptom of its dysfunction, is a pair of overpaid creeps and the broadcast equivalent of a mugging filmed and uploaded to YouTube.

Brand and Ross suffered no "lapse" in taste or judgment. Neither virtue was present to begin with. Brand, egged on by his 47-year-old chum - a man with a young family, unbelievably - called Mr Sachs no fewer than four times. The results were recorded. Individuals then had the job of editing the hilarious quips. A BBC executive, "senior" but clearly not important, not to Ross or Brand, failed to sense a problem, or wonder about the corporation's reputation, or notice a certain lack of simple humanity in the pair.

Edgy, risky Brand is supposedly given a "six-figure sum" for broadcasting once a week. In the world the BBC has made for itself, a preposterous salary alone defines worth.

Meanwhile, viewers in the Borders will be the first to "go digital" next week. People who have been paying for BBC4 and the like for all these years will have a chance, finally, to watch the thing. Many will still receive fewer than half of Freeview's channels, however. It is deemed too expensive to upgrade the relay stations. Besides, they say, mere thousands of people, far from London, will lose out.

They have bought their licence fees, of course, and thus contributed fully to the £800m the BBC was granted to manage the digital revolution. Still, hard luck. So why not part Jonathan Ross from his £6m? The BBC would solve two nasty problems simultaneously.