Ofcom fines BBC £150,000 for “Sachsgate” affair

Ofcom has today fined the BBC a total of £150,000 for the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand scandal, which took place on Radio 2 last year.

The watchdog called Ross and Brand’s comments about Georgina Baillie, the granddaughter of actor Andrew Sachs, “gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning”.

Ofcom said: “the scale of the fine reflects the extraordinary nature and seriousness of the BBC’s failures and the resulting breaches of the Code.”

The row was sparked after comments were broadcast in a pre-recorded segment on Brand’s Saturday night Radio 2 show on 18 October last year.

The following week, Brand’s repeated allegations about Baillie were broadcast again.

There were only two complaints in the week after the show was broadcast, however, media coverage exploded after the Mail on Sunday published on the story the following weekend – as a result, complaints rocketed to a total of 44,790.

Brand subsequently resigned, along with Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas and head of compliance Dave Barber.

Ross was suspended without pay for three months, although he has now returned to presenting his Friday Night with Jonathan Ross and BBC radio shows.

Today’s sanction – which comes less than a year after Ofcom fined the BBC a record £400,000 for “very serious” breaches of its broadcasting code relating to competitions – split the BBC’s negligence into “six underlying flaws”:

• “a lack of clarity about the exact role of a senior figure at the agency that represents Russell Brand, as the Executive Producer, on behalf of the independent production company;
• “the failure of the Executive Producer to attend a BBC Safeguarding Trust compliance course, despite this being a condition of the production contract;
• “the failure of the Executive Producer to sign off compliance forms for these programmes, despite this also being a condition of the production contract (it was not known whether he signed off previous forms);
• “no proactive testing and insufficient monitoring of the compliance systems in BBC Audio and Music in general, but especially after Russell Brand became an independent production from May 2008;
• “an unacceptable conflict of interest for the Line Producer seconded from the BBC on a part-time basis to the independent production company making Russell Brand; and
• “a lack of clarity about who at the BBC had editorial oversight of the series”.

Ofcom said: “These overall weaknesses set the scene for the very serious failures of the BBC’s compliance systems that resulted in the repeated broadcast of exceptionally offensive, humiliating and demeaning material.”

The failures include:

• “no senior manager at Radio 2 listened to the pre-recorded programme of 18 October 2008 in its entirety before broadcast;
• “there was a failure to obtain the informed consent of Andrew Sachs;
• “there was no attempt at all to obtain consent from Georgina Baillie as required by our Code and the BBC’s own Editorial Guidelines; and
• “the failure to complete and submit the compliance forms for Russell Brand before the broadcast on 18 October 2008.”

In a statement, the BBC Trust said it regretted that the “serious breaches” had led to a financial penalty and the “loss of licence fee payers’ money as a result”.

“The Trust’s priority remains ensuring that the highest editorial standards are maintained to safeguard licence fee payers from offence and ensuring that individuals’ privacy is not breached,” the BBC Trust added.

A spokesman for BBC management said: “The BBC has since taken comprehensive action to deal with what were unacceptable failures in editorial judgement and compliance which led to the broadcast.”