The BBC was forced last night to dispense with one of its most senior executives and suspend without pay its highest-profile presenter in the hope of drawing a line under the scandal over obscene phone calls.After four days of pressure, 35,000 complaints and an intervention by the Prime Minister, Lesley Douglas, the Controller of Radio 2, which aired the calls made by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross to the 78-year-old actor Andrew Sachs, chose to take the blame for her staff failing to stop the broadcast and resigned.
Mark Thompson, the BBC Director-General, who spent the day locked in meetings with the corporations governing body, announced that Ross was suspended from all broadcasting duties for 12 weeks and thus would forfeit nearly £1.5 million of his salary.
The BBC promised a new regime of additional and strong oversight to keep “high-risk” presenters within acceptable boundaries of taste. Mr Thompson said that Ross, who was hauled off the airwaves on Wednesday, had been given his “last chance” to prove that he could behave appropriately.
He described the presenters behaviour, in which he shouted on to Sachss answerphone that Brand had slept with his granddaughter, as “utterly unacceptable”. Ross had been told in no uncertain terms that the corporation would terminate his contract should he become embroiled in a similar scandal in future.
Sir Michael Lyons, the chairman of the BBC Trust, who had summoned Mr Thompson to an emergency meeting to discuss the crisis, said that he was dismayed by the “serious and deliberate breaches” of broadcasting regulations by Brand and Ross. Brand, who left sexually explicit messages for Sachs about his 23-year-old granddaughter, resigned from the BBC on Wednesday.
Sir Michael said that the calls were a “deplorable intrusion” and that the corporations decision to broadcast them “fell so far short of audiences legitimate expectations” that they represented “an abuse of the privileges given to the BBC”.
He ordered the BBC to broadcast an apology on Radio 2 for the offence caused by the calls, and to review all BBC Radios compliance procedures.
| Brand is the little piece of filth who campaigned for Obama and did a long obscene hit piece on Bush during the MTV awards. |