LONDON – The BBC was handed a record fine of £150,000 by the broadcasting regulator Ofcom yesterday over the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand lewd phone call scandal.
The regulator described the prank calls to veteran actor Andrew Sachs – broadcast last October on Brand’s Radio 2 show – as “gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning”.
Ofcom’s fine is a record for the BBC for a single case. The watchdog said its scale reflected the “extraordinary” nature and seriousness of the BBC’s failures and breaches of the Broadcasting Code. Ofcom said the BBC broadcast explicit, intimate and confidential information about Georgina Baillie, Sachs’s granddaughter, in both programmes without consent.
There were calls for Ross to pay the fine from his own wage – estimated at £6 million a year.
Liberal Democrat culture, media and sport spokesman Don Foster said: “This money should come out of Jonathan Ross’ salary so that broadcasting does not suffer as a consequence of this error.”
Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said the BBC’s safeguards were “riddled with holes”.
He said: “The public needs to know that this is never going to happen again.” Two episodes of Brand’s show, broadcast on October 18th and 25th, breached the code.
The first, a pre-recorded show, included claims that Brand had slept with Miss Baillie and the second contained a so-called “apology song” in which intimate references to her personal life were repeated.
In the furore that followed the calls, which sparked more than 40,000 complaints, Brand resigned and Ross was suspended without pay for three months.
Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas and head of compliance Dave Barber also resigned.
The watchdog said: “Creative risk is part of the BBC’s public service role, however, so is the management of that risk.
“In this case, Ofcom’s investigation revealed that despite the Russell Brand show being considered by the BBC to be ‘high risk’ prior to these episodes, the broadcaster had ceded responsibility for managing some of that risk to those working for the presenter, Russell Brand.
“The presenter’s interests had been given greater priority than the BBC’s responsibility to avoid unwarranted infringements of privacy and minimise the risk of harm and offence, and to maintain generally accepted standards.”
The watchdog highlighted weaknesses in the BBC’s compliance systems, including a lack of clarity about who had editorial oversight of the series and no proactive testing and insufficient monitoring of the compliance systems in BBC Audio Music in general.
It said overall weaknesses set the scene for the very serious failures of the BBC’s compliance systems that resulted in the repeated broadcast of the material.
No senior manager at Radio 2 listened to the pre-recorded programme of October 18th last year in its entirety before broadcast and there was a failure to obtain the informed consent of Sachs.
There was also no attempt to obtain consent from Miss Baillie as required by the code and the BBC’s own editorial guidelines, Ofcom found.
The BBC Trust, the corporation’s governing body, said it regretted “that these serious breaches by the BBC have led to a financial penalty being applied by Ofcom and the loss of licence fee-payers’ money as a result”.
The Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee found the comments were “an abuse of the privilege given to the BBC to broadcast to its audiences”. – (PA)