BBC fined £150,000 over Brand calls

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The regulator described the prank calls to veteran actor Andrew Sachs - broadcast last October on Brand's Radio 2 show - as "gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning".

The watchdog said its scale reflected the "extraordinary" nature and seriousness of the BBC's failures and breaches of the Broadcasting Code.

Ofcom said the BBC broadcast explicit, intimate and confidential information about Georgina Baillie, Sachs's granddaughter, in both programmes without consent.

There were calls for Ross to pay the fine from his own wage - estimated at £6 million a year.

Liberal Democrat culture, media and sport spokesman Don Foster said: "This money should come out of Jonathan Ross's salary so that broadcasting does not suffer as a consequence of this error."

Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said the BBC's safeguards were "riddled with holes". He said: "The public needs to know that this is never going to happen again."

Two episodes of Brand's show, broadcast on October 18 and 25, breached the code. The first, a pre-recorded show, included claims that Brand had slept with Miss Baillie and the second contained a so-called "apology song" in which intimate references to her personal life were repeated.

In the furore that followed the calls, which sparked more than 40,000 complaints, Brand resigned and Ross was suspended without pay for three months. Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas and head of compliance Dave Barber also resigned.

A statement from BBC management said: "As we said last October, this material should never have been broadcast and we apologised unreservedly for that. We note that Ofcom has found that senior management acted swiftly to mitigate the offence and damage caused by the breaches of the Code. The BBC has since taken comprehensive action to deal with what were unacceptable failures in editorial judgment and compliance which led to the broadcast."