In an episode of The Russell Brand Show broadcast on BBC Radio 2 on 18 October 2008, comedian Russell Brand and presenter Jonathan Ross made prank calls to actor Andrew Sachs that created controversy in the United Kingdom. Brand and Ross called Sachs to interview him on air; when he did not answer, they left lewd messages on his answering machine, including comments about Brand's relationship with Sachs' granddaughter Georgina Baillie.
The incident received little attention initially, but an article in The Mail on Sunday of 26 October 2008 led to widespread criticism of Brand, Ross, and the editorial decisions of the BBC. The event became known as Sachsgate or Manuelgate (a reference to Sachs' Fawlty Towers character Manuel). Brand and Ross were criticised by a number of MPs, including Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and the BBC received a record number of complaints. The BBC suspended Ross while it and Ofcom launched investigations. Both Brand and Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas resigned from the BBC. On 30 October, the BBC suspended Ross without pay for twelve weeks. The BBC was fined £150,000 by Ofcom.
Prank calls From April 2006 through to October 2008, Russell Brand and Matt Morgan presented the weekly BBC radio show The Russell Brand Show. Brand was joined by celebrity guests including Noel Gallagher, Noel Fielding, Jonah Hill and Morrissey. On 16 October 2008, Andrew Sachs, who portrayed Manuel in the 1970s television sitcom Fawlty Towers, was scheduled to be a phone-in guest on the show. Brand had briefly been in a relationship with Sachs' granddaughter Georgina Baillie.
The episode was prerecorded due to Brand's work commitments. After being unable to reach Sachs on his home telephone, Brand and his co-host that week, Jonathan Ross, left Sachs four voice messages on his answering machine. In the first message, Brand joked about Fawlty Towers and the fact that both he and Sachs had appeared in The Bill, but was interrupted by Ross shouting out "he fucked your granddaughter". The rest of the message and the following three messages were all characterised by Brand and Ross attempting to apologise for Ross' outburst, but each quickly descended into farce; for example, Brand sang to Sachs: "It was consensual and she wasn't menstrual", and Ross asked to marry him. Brand later said that listening to the calls was like hearing "two idiots dancing towards a canyon".
Complaints On 25 October, Brand presented his last edition of his radio show with co-host Simon Amstell, which they performed live. Shortly before going on air, Brand was informed that The Mail on Sunday would be running a story about the phone calls. During the show, Brand apologised to Sachs, but also devoted much of the show to deriding the Daily Mail for its support of Nazism in the lead-up to World War II. In his apology to Sachs, Brand said: "What's worse – leaving a swearword on Andrew Sachs' answerphone or tacitly supporting Adolf Hitler when he took charge of the Third Reich?"
Sachs later stated he had not given permission for the messages to be broadcast. The BBC originally stated that they were "not aware of any complaint by Mr Sachs", but later confirmed a complaint had been received, and apologised. Brand issued an apology for making the calls but stated it was "funny" during his last radio show, before the Mail had printed the story. Ofcom, the telecommunications regulator, announced its own investigation. On 28 October, the BBC said that it had received 4,700 complaints, after the calls became international news. Later the same day, this number had passed 10,000. The same afternoon, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the incident "clearly inappropriate and unacceptable". The following day the number of complaints was said to have surpassed 18,000.
This incident resulted in the third-highest number of complaints to the BBC, behind only the airing of Jerry Springer: The Opera and rolling coverage of Prince Philip memorial programmes in April 2021. The incident escalated into a media and political storm that, in much of the British media, eclipsed news of the 2008 financial crisis, the 2008 United States presidential election, and 2008 Nord-Kivu campaign.
In reaction to the telephone calls, Baillie said that her relationship with Brand had been brief and she now felt "betrayed" that he had revealed it to her grandfather. Baillie called for both Brand and Ross to be sacked by the BBC and stated that she and her family would be considering whether to make a formal complaint to the police. Sachs stated that he had no intention of making a complaint to the police or taking the matter further.
Aftermath
Actions taken by Ross, Brand, and the BBC On 29 October, Director-General of the BBC Mark Thompson announced that Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross were suspended pending the outcome of an investigation by Tim Davie, director of BBC Audio and Music. The suspension meant that, for the week, Ross would not be appearing on his regular Friday Night with Jonathan Ross television show, Film 2008 with Jonathan Ross, or his Saturday morning Radio 2 show. Similarly Brand would not be hosting his regular Saturday night Radio 2 show or appearing as a guest captain on an episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks due to be aired on 30 October; the episode had been taped before his resignation, and aired on BBC Two on 19 January 2011, more than two years after the incident. Thompson called the events a "gross lapse of taste by the performers and the production team" (who chose to broadcast the pre-recorded show) that angered licence-payers. Thompson offered a personal and unreserved apology to Sachs and his family. In an interview, Sachs revealed that he had received and accepted written apologies from Brand and Ross. Brand resigned from the BBC later in the day.
On the evening of 30 October it was announced that Controller of Radio 2 Lesley Douglas had tendered her resignation, which had been accepted. Her resignation letter did not address the question of whether she had approved the pre-recorded show for transmission. That day, Ross was suspended without pay from all BBC shows for a period of twelve weeks.
The BBC issued an apology on 8 November, stating that the calls were "grossly offensive" and a "serious breach of editorial standards". The corporation apologised specifically to Sachs and Baillie, and also to licence fee payers. The evening before this formal apology, David Barber, head of Specialist Music and Compliance at Radio 2, also resigned. Like Douglas, he had been aware of the contents of the show, and had sanctioned the segment's broadcast.
Reactions from politicians and the media Fifteen MPs signed a motion in the House of Commons, tabled by Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay and Conservative MP Nigel Evans, calling for Brand and Ross to no longer be funded by the licence fee (which funds the BBC). The chairman of the House of Commons select committee on culture, media and sport, John Whittingdale, stated that an investigation by the BBC was needed, but stopped short of calling for Ross and Brand to be sacked. The chairman of the House of Lords Select Committee on Communication, Lord Fowler, in a letter to The Times stated that there were "fundamental flaws" in the way that the BBC was regulated and governed, and that there was "confusion all round" because two parallel bodies, the BBC Trust and Ofcom, were investigating the incident, and it was "both unclear which of them the public should complain to and which of them had precedence over the other".
Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, speaking on the Radio 4 Today Programme on 30 October, also refused to say whether he thought Ross should be sacked, asserting that politicians should remain at "arm's length" from such decisions. In a speech at the London School of Economics the previous day he had criticised the decision by the BBC to broadcast the programme, which had been recorded two days prior to its transmission, saying that "[t]he BBC was quite wrong to take the decision to broadcast the offensive phone calls". He also demurred about calling for the resignations of anyone in BBC management, saying that "[i]t is wrong, in principle, for politicians to be calling for heads of individual broadcasting to be removed", and criticised the BBC for not releasing the name of the person who had given approval for the show to be broadcast.
Hunt was speaking to the LSE about socially responsible broadcasting and stated "I do think the BBC is a socially responsible broadcaster, I just think we need to hear that." He argued that broadcasters were "not being ambitious enough", and outlined his party's plans, should it be elected to government at the next general election, to relax regulation for those broadcasters who agreed to provide only "socially responsible" output. In addition to citing the prank calls as a "perfect example" of where such a "responsibility deal" could have operated, he also pointed to Channel 4 as an example, stating that it was "not good enough" for it to produce "worthy" programmes such as Dispatches documenting alcohol abuse in the US, whilst at the same time it was broadcasting programmes such as Hollyoaks where such abuse took up, according to his estimates, 18% of screen time. The culture spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, Don Foster, criticised this idea, stating that it "threatened the very foundational principles of freedom and independence" of British media, arguing that such government interference in television programming would be "a very sad day for British broadcasting", and pointing out that regulatory mechanisms already exist to deal with issues such as this.
On 29 October, Conservative MP Nadine Dorries called for the BBC to terminate the contracts of both Ross and Brand. In the Commons David Hanson criticised the comments for being inappropriate and not "in keeping with broadcasting". The conservative journalist Charles Moore announced he would not pay his television licence after the BBC's failure to sack Ross,Charles Moore "The BBC was too scared to sack Jonathan Ross, so the obscenity goes on", The Daily Telegraph, 22 November 2008 a decision which eventually led to Moore being fined in May 2010.James Robinson "Charles Moore fined for Jonathan Ross-inspired TV licence boycott", The Guardian, 11 May 2010
Secretary of State for Justice Jack Straw, writing in his local newspaper the Lancashire Telegraph on 30 October, became the first Cabinet Minister to call for the pair to be sacked, arguing that if both presenters had worked in commercial radio "they'd have been given their P45 before you could say 'Jack Robinson'."
On the same day, Shadow Leader of the House of Commons, Theresa May, called for a Commons debate on the BBC's handling of the affair.
Reaction against censures and suspensions In the days following the suspensions, a number of celebrities, particularly from television and radio, came out in support of Brand and Ross. Many felt that, whilst the incident was unacceptable, it was not deserving of the strong criticism it received, especially when there were other issues troubling the United Kingdom.