The resignation letter | BBC Trust statement | Profile: From pipe and slippers to obscene calls

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 corporation’s 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 presenter’s behaviour, in which he shouted on to Sachs’s 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 corporation’s 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 Radio’s compliance procedures.

He said: “The trust’s job is to ensure that the BBC provides a wide range of programming to reflect a diverse society made up of differing ages, interests and backgrounds. In doing so, however, it is essential that the BBC demonstrates its commitment to the highest level of editorial standards at all times. The BBC has fallen way short of the public’s overall expectations in this case, and it is essential that lessons are learnt to avoid further lapses in the future.”

The trustees were dismayed by what they saw as a lax regime of control over radio presenters, and ordered Mr Thompson to tighten control over content immediately and to subject “edgy” presenters to greater scrutiny.

Ms Douglas, who is believed to have been unhappy that junior members of her staff faced dismissal over the incident, said in a letter to Mr Thompson that her resignation was her decision 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.”

Mr Thompson was also told to write personally to Sachs to apologise for what he termed a “serious breach of editorial compliance that allowed grossly offensive material to be broadcast”. The actor, who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers, said that he had received a call from Mr Thompson and that he considered the matter closed. “I want to get back to normal life soon,” he said. “I feel a lot for the other two guys and woman who have lost their jobs. I wish them well and hope they survive it.”

Mr Thompson, his deputy Mark Byford, and Tim Davie, the BBC director of audio and music, spent nearly seven hours at the trust’s headquarters in Westminster after presenting the Editorial Standards Committee with an interim report on how the offending material came to be aired.

Douglas, 45, who took over Radio 2 in 2004, turned it into the most popular station in Britain, winning 13 million listeners with a new contemporary music policy and a talent roster stretching from Terry Wogan to Ross and Brand. She did not hear the programme before it was aired and Mr Thompson said that he had accepted her resignation with “real sadness”.

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