Even if you make $10Million a year, saying sex talk while broadcasting and insulting others may not work for you….
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 30, 2008; Page A18
LONDON, Oct. 29 — Junior high-school boys everywhere, listen up: One highly paid BBC personality was forced to quit and another was suspended Wednesday for making a prank phone call using dirty words.
The two radio and TV stars, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, have been subjected to a public flogging all week on TV news and radio talk shows and on the front pages of British newspapers.
The Sun tabloid dismissed Brand and Ross as “sickos.” Prime Minister Gordon Brown took a few minutes away from meetings in Paris on the global financial crisis to reprimand their “inappropriate and unacceptable behavior.”
Brand, who recently starred in the Hollywood film “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and hosted this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, resigned from his BBC radio program late Wednesday after more than 27,000 people complained.
Ross, who earns almost $10 million a year as a radio and TV host, was suspended and apologized for his “juvenile and thoughtless remarks.” He will remain off the airwaves until top BBC bosses meet later this week. BBC chief Mark Thompson cut short a vacation to return to London to deal with the fallout.
Ofcom, Britain’s broadcasting regulator, is also investigating, and politicians across the spectrum have condemned Brand, Ross and the BBC.
The problems started Oct. 18, when BBC radio aired a show of Brand’s on which Ross and Brand made a phone call to Andrew Sachs, a 78-year-old actor famous for his role on the British TV comedy classic “Fawlty Towers.”
Brand, 33, had once had a romantic fling with Sachs’s granddaughter. On the prank call, he and Ross left a message on Sachs’s answering machine describing graphically what Brand had gotten up to with the young woman. After they hung up, the two said on air that they might have to make it up to Sachs by breaking into his house and performing a sex act on him.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008
/10/29/AR2008102904436.html