Calamity Jenas
It’s a year of BBC sackings. How much Huw/Jenas should we see?
Hello humans! I hope you have had a wondrous week.
I may be relatively new to Earth, but for me there are always some telltale signs of the British summer: pouring rain, the premature return of league football, Christmas adverts (give it a week), and the denizens of Fleet Street taking leave of their senses even more than usual.
This means that while war rages on the edge of Europe, and the USA chooses between a progressive female President and a regressive, moronic piece of human shit, the majority of British newspapers saw fit on Friday to do a front page splash on Jermaine Jenas being sacked from the BBC and stood down from other media outlets.
This has had an unfortunately paradoxical effect, which is that in pointing out its unimportance I’m now discussing it here in your inbox. Damn.
Still, there are elements of this story which I do think merit our attention and - more importantly - our laughter. Fortunately, none of these are directly related to Mr Jenas’ innocence or guilt, so we can go to town on the whole thing.
First, and perhaps most relevant to the population at large, I make this supposition. Having done first-hand research and trawled public opinion, it seems to me an entirely uncontroversial statement to make that in the fields of football punditry (where the bar is low) and One Show presenting (where there is no bar), he was astronomically abysmal. So his loss is, for everyone else, no loss at all.
Second, and most amusing, are the historic clips of Mr Jenas that are now resurfacing and biting him on the arse with all the accuracy that he so rarely displayed in central midfield.
Many people’s favourite is the TikTok clip of the sacked pundit speaking the following words of Confucian wisdom: "There's times when you've been out all week busy, working hard, securing the coin. Coin, coin, coin, coin, coin, coin, coin, coin, coin. Only certain men know what I'm talking about when it comes to securing the coin. But you just feel like you've earned it. You feel like you deserve it. [sips pint] "Go on then! Go on! Lovely drop that, lovely drop, city boy."
Was he trying to impersonate somebody else? To quote the far superior Barry Davies, who cares?
For me, the Jenas TikTok calamity pales in comparison to a recently unearthed - and beautifully prophetic - moment from ‘Michael McIntyre’s Big Show’. (Trust me, this is the only time that this substack will use the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘Michael McIntyre’ in close proximity.)
For any readers who have yet to treat themselves to this wonderment, in the clip Jenas is a guest on the ‘big’ show alongside his wife Ellie, and he allows McIntyre access to his phone for the regular ‘Send To All’ feature. Whereupon McIntyre discovers a photo of Jenas posing toplessly and promptly sends it to JJ’s entire phonebook, alongside a bragging message. Later in the show a number of replies come back, including one from a One Show producer, who says ‘I’m sending this to HR’. #Awks
Is it wrong to be amused by the hubris and nemesis of an overpaid football pundit potentially abusing his power and causing their own fall from grace? No, of course not. You’re only human. Hell, I’m not even human and I think it’s hilarious. (Note to editors: that doesn’t mean it’s front page news.)
But there’s something else in this story that intrigues me. Newspapers including The Times are reporting that Jenas has also been almost entirely expunged from the BBC’s own public archive. Given that his gurning mug has been on literally hundreds of programmes over the last few years, that could theoretically mean a lot of licence fee hours being spent on junior techies hitting delete.
At the time of writing, if you search ‘Jenas’ on iPlayer, only two items still remain. One is a youth series called The Football Academy. And wonderfully - in fact, I’m going to say it, beautifully - the other is his suddenly notorious guest appearance on Michael McIntyre’s Big Show. Perhaps the BBC hasn’t just sacked Jermaine. They’re trolling him too.
Masterful though that would be, I am an interstellar arbiter of fairness so I’m going to ask the question: is the BBC being a bit out of order?
Remember, I am a big defender of the Beeb, being the greatest interplanetary champion for Ceefax, David Attenborough, Only Connect, and much more besides. Still, something here feels a bit off.
It’s one thing for the corporation to sack an employee for wrongdoing. But to publicly disgrace them by removing their output à la Huw Edwards before any details of the case are widely known? This seems a trifle, how shall we say, enthusiastic. Could it be that Auntie Beeb is overcompensating for reacting so sluggishly to the Edwards crisis (and the Strictly crisis) by jumping the gun in Jenasgate? iPlayer now features more erasure than a 1980s episode of Top of The Pops… that hasn’t itself also been erased.
Who benefits from Jenas being ‘erased’ like this? It’s not as if anyone - literally anyone - was ever going to go onto BBC iPlayer and hunt out any programme on which Jenas ever appeared, just for the entertainment value. So for 70 million Britons, the Beeb’s decision has made no impact whatsoever.
Being kicked off the pitch might well annoy Jermaine, and for all we know, that might be the motivation. Maybe morally he deserves every bit of that irritation. But equally he might not deserve it. So taking action now, in a way that seems to equate JJ’s offence with that of Huw Edwards, is a strong call. To mix my sporting metaphors, whoever’s driving the BBC bike might have rowed onto a sticky wicket.
So why is the BBC indulging in another act of Orwellian editing? It’s the TV commissioning equivalent of deleting your internet history, or dropping your phone into the North Sea. If no one can see it, it never happened, right…?
But you, the long-suffering, licence-fee-paying spouses of the Beeb, deserve better. You deserve to see what they’ve been up to. I argue it would therefore be a far greater punishment for broadcaster and presenter alike for every single Jermaine Jenas programme to be left online forever.
Live by the crap presenter, die by the crap presenter.
On current trends, he’ll be doing the sport on GB News before the year is out.
CB x
P.S. If you’re enjoying my Substack, please spread the word to your nearest and dearest.
P.P.S. Come see me on tour! All the details are HERE. Plus I’m doing a warm-up gig in London on Weds 28th September at the Museum of Comedy, at 8.30pm. Tickets for that HERE!
