Alternative universe: Bill Grundy & the Sex Pistols

The TVPs would hav a song called "Here's Bill Grundy Now."

Bugger all?
Seriously, wouldn't the Pistols and punk have continued their inexorable rise anyway? (Please remember this was five years before I was born so I may be speaking out of my ass at this point).

"inexorable rise" is a bad phrase for it: a dam was waiting to burst – NOT (incidentally) to sweep away the dinosaurs of Prog Rock, which is a tiresome DadRock trivialisation – and mclaren and the pistols happened to be the pointmen on the day the chance actually came. One of the several million reasons why THE FILTH AND THE FURY is a worthless-piece-o-shit as a look back is its inability to note how incredibly weedy and commonplace the Great Confrontation now seems. Rotten says "shit" and then visibly blushes; Cook takes up Grundy's sarcastic challenge to Curse It Up, and calls BG a "fucking rotter"... well, "fuck" is still a watershed word, but "rotter" = a Beano-insult). Far more "extreme" things occur every week on The Priory, if not SMTV Live.

So yes, if not Pistols/Grundy, then Johnny Moped on Russell Harty three weeks down the line.

yeah, I was shocked (simply shocked!) by how tame that exchange was when I finally saw The F&F, and how pink-cheeked & guilty the Pistols seemed - like little kids repeating naughty words for their older sibling's amusement. A bit filthy, but hardly furious. They only did what Grundy begged them to do. It's hard to imagine how something so awkward and embarrassing could become so mythic. I'm guessing the excitement it generated was more to do with the tabloid coverage of it than the event itself.