George Lamb's anti-Travellers 'joke' doesn't bother Ofcom

Ho-ho: Although George Lamb compared travellers to "asbestos", Ofcom have accepted his apology for this little exchange:

George Lamb: “He's now said ‘I'll give my land to travellers before I give it to Trump’

Marc Hughes: Did he say that? Brilliant

George Lamb: And you ain't moving travellers off basically. Travellers is [sic] like asbestos basically. The whole gaff is getting condemned."

Over to you, BBC:

The BBC stated that George Lamb’s show is an established feature of the 6Music schedule and the show has a “loyal following of listeners who understand and enjoy its somewhat quirky format and direction”.

Well, yes. But you could say the same about the Daily Mail.

Still, Lamb apologised, and Ofcom will consider the matter closed.

Also in the latest regulatory round-up: Alex Zane's date rape joke was up for consideration. This is where XFM attempted a pastiche of Mike Sarne's Code Of Love called Won't Take No For An Answer. Ofcom could see what they were trying to do:

It is clear from the introduction to the song that the programme was aiming to make a pastiche of Sarne’s original song. The presenters were attempting to satirise what used to be acceptable in the 1960’s but would now be considered totally inappropriate by today’s standards. If was therefore always possible that the result could be offensive and therefore the context that such material was presented would be particularly important.

However, the extract from Sarne’s song played by the presenters bore little relation to the pastiche they attempted. The subject matter and tone of “Code of Love” were vastly different to the presenters’ own song (which was supposedly inspired by the former). In Ofcom’s view, the presenters’ song was likely to have been perceived by listeners as recounting a physical and sexual assault. As such, the actions of the man in this song shared little resemblance to those of the suitor in the “Code of Love” extract played by the broadcaster. Ofcom also noted that the subject matter of the presenters’ song was portrayed as a light-hearted joke and the material was transmitted at breakfast-time, when children may be in the audience.

XFM had taken action before Ofcom started investigating, which helped matters - although it might have been a bit more convincing had it not offered up a justification in saying that the network wasn't "aimed at a conservative audience". What does that mean? There's meant to be something progressive in snickering at jokes about a bloke taking a woman down "where there ain’t no big lights" and ripping her underwear?

Viking FM somehow slipped up and invited a tea-time audience to call in with "stories about dogging" - Bauer apologised. And Northern Media Group's Northern Ireland radio stations and Your Radio in Scotland both invited listeners to text in to a pre-recorded programme, offering the excuse that it made the programme "more interesting" and "more interactive" respectively. More interactive? How is spending money sending a text to an empty studio more interactive? Was the station hoping to generate some sort of faith, where people communicated with an entity they knew in their hearts was a fiction? Ofcom was having none of it, and have issued a statement that this sort of thing will be cracked down on. In future.

The Enemy realise they might need friends

We know you'll have been unable to settle all weekend, wondering if The Enemy and Alex Zane are still at war.

The good news is that The Enemy have been thinking - probably about the combined marketing push offered by Channel 4 and XFM to their target audience of not-too-fussy boys in skintight jeans - and have offered a truce:

"I'm willing to play an acoustic set on his show. We've got to move on."

Not only have they got to move on, they've also got a large pile of unsold copies of We'll Live And Die In These Towns they've got to move on out of warehouses.

We love the idea that coming onto Zane's show and playing an acoustic session is some sort of concession, though - it's like if Galtieri had offered to turn up in Plymouth and translate all the street signs into Spanish to end the Falklands War.

Pretend that we're cred

MediaGuardian's Monkey column reports on Alex Zane getting all overcome with excitement at the recent Royal Television Society Futures event:

Zane wants more live TV where you don't quite know what's going to happen next, citing as an example the edition of The Word where a member of L7 threw a tampon into the audience.

Erm... except, of course, that never happened. Donita Sparks did drop her pants on the Word, and she did lob a used tampon into the crowd at the Reading Festival, but somewhere in Zane's fevered memory box these two incidents have become conflated.

Making enemies

Alex Zane and The Enemy have fallen out, apparently after the band took offence at his interview approach. Zane, for some reason, failed to treat them like they were the most astonishing band ever; the countered with a letter that claimed he'd slept his way to the top. (We know, the 'top' being Xfm and the declining Popworld strand in this case.) Oh, and they appear to have scattered some cheap homophobia over the top, too.

The two sides then met at the Vodafone awards:

"He came up to me saying thanks for the letter and I said that was alright mate because I genuinely do think you're a shitt presenter. I then said I'd find it humorous if, upon leaving the building, he'd get hit by a bus."

Clearly, The Enemy are as funny as they are musically talented.

Zane has had enough:

"I think if someone can be that rude, offensive and nasty, no matter how good his music is and how nice his bandmates are, I'm done with them."

Words which would send a chill through the marrow of all right-thinking people, were Zane in a position to damage their careers in some way.

Laverne's loss is Zane's gane

After the somewhat abrupt departure of Lauren Laverne from the XFM Breakfast Show, Alex Zane has been given the job. He, however, won't be ready to start until the end of May.

They could have planned this somewhat better, couldn't they?