Jonathan Ross can keep his job at the BBC after the corporation’s supervisory body said that although the prank calls made by the presenter and comedian Russell Brand last month were "grossly offensive and should never have been broadcast", it was not calling for Ross to be sacked.
The BBC Trust said it was a "deplorable intrusion" into the private lives of actor Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter but it was happy with the action proposed by the corporation's bosses.
More than 40,000 people contacted the BBC to complain about Brand's Radio 2 show containing the lewd calls to Sachs, who played Spanish waiter Manuel in ‘Fawlty Towers.’
The presenters left messages on the actor's answerphone joking that Brand had slept with Georgina Baillie, Sachs's 23-year-old granddaughter.
Brand and Lesley Douglas, the head of Radio 2, resigned amid a growing furore while Ross, one of the corporation's highest paid stars, was suspended for 12 weeks without pay.
"There is no place on the BBC for casual and gratuitous abuse of the most offensive language without clear editorial justification," said chairman Michael Lyons.
"It has been a disappointing and dismal episode - however let us not forget that BBC proves everyday that it usually gets things right."
The Trust said the broadcast was a failure of editorial judgement but was not a sign of an endemic malaise across the BBC.
