Wossy suspended for 3 months
Friday, October 31st, 2008
Jonathan Ross has kept his job in the furore surrounding the prank phone calls that saw the resignation of fellow presenter Russell Brand and Lesley Douglas, the controller of BBC 2, it emerged last night.
However, the 48 year old has been suspended from the corporation for 12 weeks - sans pay - amid the ongoing controversy. Ross is the BBC’s highest paid presenter, with a three-year £18 million contract, and it is thought that his suspension will cost him up to £1.5 million.
The phone messages to the actor Andrew Sachs, broadcast on a pre-recorded BBC Radio 2 show, included boasts from the duo that Brand had slept with his granddaughter, Georgina Baillie, and suggestions that Sachs might kill himself over the revelation.
Last night the BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson said Ross’s contribution to Brand’s show “was utterly unacceptable and cannot be allowed to go uncensured or without sanction.” Whilst suspending Ross was an “exceptional step”, Thompson said he believed it a “proportionate response” to the star’s behaviour, stressing that Ross was on his “final warning”. He has also come under fire in the past for suggesting that Conservative leader David Cameron might have harboured sexual fantasies about Margaret Thatcher.
“Jonathan Ross has already made a comprehensive and unreserved personal apology to Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter,” said Thompson. “I believe that he fully understands the seriousness of what has happened. I have made very clear to him the central importance of the clause in his contract about not bringing the BBC into disrepute. We agree that nothing like this must ever happen again and that tight discipline will be required for the future.”
Lesley Douglas, the controller of BBC2 was not so fortunate. After four days of pressure and 35,000 complaints, including Prime Ministerial intervention, she chose to take the blame for her staff failing to stop the broadcast and resigned.
Ms Douglas, who is believed to have felt unhappy that junior members of staff were being threatened with the sack over the controversial broadcast, told Mr Thompson in a letter that the decision to quit was hers alone. “The events of the last two weeks happened on my watch,” she wrote. “I believe it is right that I take responsibility for what has happened. It is a matter of the greatest possible sadness to me that a programme on my network has been the cause of such a controversy.”
She had not heard the programme before it was broadcast, and Mr Thompson said that it was with “real sadness” that he accepted her resignation.
Douglas, who took over control of Radio 2 in 2004, transformed it into Britain’s most popular radio station and attracting 13 million new listeners. Under her direction the station targeted 20-and 30-somethings with a new contemporary music policy and star presenters such as Terry Wogan, Ross and Brand.
