[Red Moon]

Well the blame ultimately has to be attributed to Russell Brands and Jonathan Ross, since if they had not made the calls then none of this would have happened.

However there is a chain of failures in the whole story, and part of the blame could be dished out to a lot of people.

Clearly the producer of the show Radio, an employee Brand's production company, should have stopped them before they made the calls at all and advised them it was a bad idea and that they could be actually breaking the law, since it is an offence under the Communications Act 2003 to use the telephone system to repeatedly send messages that were grossly offensive, of an indecent, obscene and menacing character for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety.

And the BBC who commissioned the show should have had tighter editorial control of the show and they should have listened to the complaints from Andrew Sachs before the show was aired and carefully checked the shows content. Clearly that part of the show should have been pulled just on the grounds that it infringed on the privacy of a member of the public, who in this case happened to be an actor.


Then we turn to the press and in particular the Daily Mail which made a whole campaign out of it to get Brand and Ross sacked. If it wasn't for there readers, many of whom that complained to Ofcom and who didn't even hear the show, then all of this could have got handled internally by the BBC complaints department and Brand wouldn't have had to go and the result would have been the same, tighter editorial controls over the commissioning and broadcasting of programmes of a controversial nature.