The behaviour last year of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand was simply one of the latest targets in a string of condemnatory outbursts about inappropriate role models for the young. You can probably go back forever. Monty Python, The Tube, Chris Evans on Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, and Chris Moyles on the radio were earlier objects of such moral judgement.
Even the Milltown Boys with whom I worked in south Wales, whose speech was generously peppered with the F word, stand in judgement: their young delinquent successors, in their view, are just "little bastards"; at least, as one of them put it, they were "little bastards with manners". Indeed, in speaking to their parents and to women, they were able to switch off the F word like a tap.
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