The BBC is to allow less swearing on its television channels next year, the corporation’s head of television said yesterday.

The decision follows the row over the obscene phone calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to the 78-year-old actor Andrew Sachs, as well as growing unease with Ross’s language on his Friday night BBC One show.

Jana Bennett, director of BBC Vision, said that the corporation did not want to alienate its viewers and had taken the decision to “push back” the number of expletives.

In its final report on the obscene calls row last week, the BBC Trust, the corporation’s internal watchdog, criticised Ross’s BBC One chat show. In one programme, in May, he told the actress Gwyneth Paltrow that he “would f*** her”, which the trust said was “gratuitous and unnecessarily offensive”.

Mrs Bennett, to whom the controller of each BBC television channel reports, told the Manchester Media Festival that the presenter had agreed to reduce swearing in his television show after that incident.

She said: “There was a mutual thing to push back on the language. We didn’t want to get into a situation where we were pushing away part of the audience of the show.”

She said that she had to approve personally every use of the C-word on BBC television, adding: “That was one of the surprising aspects of the job when I got it.” F*** and motherf*****”, which are considered the next most offensive words, were referred to channel controllers to clear.

Mrs Bennett said that anybody who tried to count swearwords on the BBC would see that they had become less frequent even since the early autumn.

“We’ve actually been pushing back a bit on language,” she said. “It is possible that some language alienates some audiences unnecessarily. There will be less F-ing but the blinding seems to be OK.”

Mrs Bennett said that there would be greater discussion about the appropriateness of swearing on the BBC, and pointed to the example of a documentary following soldiers in Afghanistan. That was more likely to justify inclusion of profanities that might offend in different contexts, she said.

She added: “There’s higher sensitivity about making sure there’s more discussion about slots, type of channel and genre. I think the idea that you can alienate audiences is – even if people don’t ring up – we don’t want people to be put off, even if they’re silent.” Ross and Brand’s prerecorded calls to Sachs, on Brand’s Radio 2 show, generated more than 40,000 complaints to the broadcaster.

Dave Barber, the station’s head of compliance, and Lesley Douglas, Controller of Radio 2, both resigned. A subsequent investigation into the incident showed that Douglas had authorised the programme’s broadcast with a single e-mail, containing only the word “yes”.

The BBC Trust described the calls and their broadcast as a “deplorable intrusion” and an “unacceptable breach of privacy”. Brand resigned, but Ross escaped the sack and is suspended without pay until late January.

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