The Jonathan Ross Matter

[kevin_standlee]

[I've been listening to a lot of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar episodes while driving to and from the Bay Area, and the episode titles are all in the form of "The ___ Matter."]

Cheryl Morgan writes more eloquently than I can about the brief tenure of Jonathan Ross as Loncon 3's Hugo Awards host.

ConJosé had a "Master of Ceremonies" decided and invited (Tad Williams, who did a fine job) while we were bidding. This is not quite the same thing as a selected host for each event of the convention, particularly the Hugo Awards Ceremony; it's just short of being a Guest of Honor (you get a footnote in the Long List of Worldcons for it). Accordingly, the Bay Area in 2002 Worldcon bid committee all had a say in the selection, and it was a multi-valued selection: When we were initially considering candidates, you had four possible choices: Yes, Abstain (which of course was the default if you did nothing), No, and Veto. Any member of the bidding committee could unilaterally veto a candidate about which s/he felt so strongly that if we had selected that person, the bidcom member would have felt obliged to resign rather than appear to be supporting that choice. This is stronger than a No, which said, "I don't care for this candidate, but will accept the will of the committee and work with it if the rest of you really want this person." I devised this system myself, and I thought it led to a slate of candidates that the entire bid committee could support. Those who joined the operating committee after we won the bid naturally knew who the Guests were by then and could not plausibly claim they didn't know with whom they had to work.

Again, I stress that a Master of Ceremonies/Toastmaster selected before the convention as a "headliner" (just after the Guests of Honor) isn't the same thing as an MC selected to host an individual event, and the mechanics are different.

Having had to deal with horrible PR blunders with the 2002 Worldcon makes me sympathetic and less willing to criticize other Worldcons' mistakes. (And Twitter hadn't even been invented yet!) Go read Cheryl. I share her frustration, although I'm not yet so annoyed as to walk away from everything just yet.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I disagree with Cheryl's points all around - except for the straightforward one that "Ross is an inappropriate person for the job if a large number of people would be uncomfortable with his presence" - but I'm not going to argue directly with her about it.

She may be right that Ross has reformed his sordid ways. But he has been so willfully tactless for so long (wtf was that bit with Andrew Sachs' granddaughter? It didn't even make sense as a bad joke) that he needs a long period of showing in public that he's reformed before he should get an honor like being Hugo MC.

Then there was the question of his attracting unwanted and the wrong kind of press attention. Cheryl says you can't control that and we'd get it anyway. But press attention is not an indivisible sum. It can come in a variety of quantities and types. Ross's presence would not create the problem, but it would increase it dramatically.

Then there was the question of his not being "a proper fan." The exclusionist terminology distorts the argument. supergee put it well: "Back in the days before Worldcon aspired to be almost as good as DragonCon, the concom would pick one of the many amusing people who write the stuff, such as Marta Randall or Bob Shaw*, and the ceremony would be fun for everybody, and the tabloids wouldn't care about us." That's the positive case on picking someone who's part of the community. I don't know who these people are that Cheryl often refers to who believe that she's not "a proper fan" herself, but they must be a minority, whereas the statement that Jonathan Ross is not part of the community even if he knows something about SF and likes the stuff rises to the level of objective fact.

*or Tad Williams, for that matter

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I disagree on the core point, although I accept it depends on what you want in the Hugo Awards themselves. If you want an Award ceremony which might get some major press attention and an enormous number of local walkins then Ross was exactly the right choice. My wife was even considering cutting short her vacation in Paris to go to them if he was hosting.

I have seen enough of him doing non-chatshow stuff to be confident he'd have done an excellent job even though, and I can't stress this enough, I can't f'king stand that bloody awful chatshow nor his radio show when it was on.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I have seen enough of him doing non-chatshow stuff to be confident he'd have done an excellent job

That rings too closely a parallel to testifying how wonderful a person Groper X is when he's not groping. I wouldn't want to be the person assuring Seanan McGuire that Ross wouldn't make any fat jokes. She wouldn't believe me, and she'd be right to be skeptical.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the fat jokes. I invite you to bring me the example in question.

It's actually very hard, it took a friend about half an hour of massive google-fu and involved ignoring a bunch of stuff Ross has said about fat women including how sexy he finds them.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I invite you to ask Seanan McGuire. She's the one who raised the objection.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that I'm the one who has to prove anything here. I am also not the one who ended up having to apologize to a teenage girl or managed to get headlines in the London Evening Standard about Jane Goodman leaving twitter because of how she was treated.

I'd have a smidgen less contempt for McGuire at the moment if she hadn't offered her services at host at the same time as bringing down portions of this shit storm on fandom. That's not to absolve the con chairs but McGuire has played her part in this clusterfuck.

The example I finally did find referenced was a throwaway comment in the middle of a lot of others at the British Comedy Awards which, if you've not seen them is basically a 2 hour roast of the entire British establishment which Ross hosted for many years and is pretty raw stuff across the board. One year it was suggested that a leading cabinet minister was out cottaging, some of the other gags are much much worse. Comparing the behaviour of anybody at that particular event with anything else is troubling in the extreme and given that's the only example I can find suggests that Ms McGuire was either working off extremely poor second hand information or off an agenda. At this stage, given the mess it's made for everybody involved I don't give a damn.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I didn't ask you to prove anything. I'm saying that the person you should be asking to prove something is McGuire, not me. It's her problem that the defenders of Ross's pick have to deal with.

My own previous knowledge of Ross is solely as one of the persons pulling that utterly inexplicable phone prank involving Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter. That put him in the box of "utter jerk" as far as I'm concerned, and I see no reason to extract him from it.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

No, it is not! It really is not, and if you don't get that then I'm very sorry for you because it's at the heart of what's just happened here. If it's acceptable to you that people make shit up to prove a point on Twitter then that is entirely your own problem at cuts to the core of what was done here.

Was he a jerk over the Sachs stuff? Ignoring that the bulk of the shock was engineered by the Mail on Sunday, yes, jerk. I'll take that. Did he say sorry? Yes. Did he apologize for what he said about Trans people and then meet with Foz Meddows to be taught his error. Yes he did that too. Did he use his bully pulpit at the BBC to complain about the lack of racial diversity in their line up? Yeah, that too.

Does any of this make it acceptable to involve his wife and teenage daughter? Hell no. Not one bit.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"No, it is not!" What is the "it" in this sentence. I am not following your point in this paragraph at all. I'm guessing that you think I said something other than what I said, or vice versa.

Do you think McGuire "made shit up"?

Gee, he said he was sorry. Does that make it all OK? No.

How did McGuire involve Ross's wife and teenage daughter?

(For that matter, how did anybody involve them? I must have missed something here.)

Didn't Ross involve Andrew Sachs's granddaughter in his shenanigans?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm going to try expressing this again.

The pre-existing fact that the defenders of Ross's pick have to deal with is the already present existence of a lot of people who find him appalling. Whatever he's actually done or not done, whether he deserves it or not, whether he's apologized or not, it's inexcusable for the committee to have been surprised by the negative reaction. This is a guy who has his own "Controversies" section on his Wikipedia page.

And I don't buy this notion of him as restrained and contrite, either. Mark Evanier says "Yeah, Jonathan has an abrasive sense of humor and apparently this worried some. Personally, I've also known him to have mature, sensitive taste as to the proper moments to unleash that sense o' humor and also to direct it to the proper subjects."

Oh, does he? Look at that list of "controversies". That may be Evanier's idea of "mature, sensitive" tastes, but not mine, and I don't want it at my Worldcon.