Another senior Radio 2 executive has resigned as a result of what even I am now calling Sachsgate. The resignation of the station's Head Of Specialist Music And Compliance, Dave Barber, was confirmed on Friday.
His departure follows that of his boss, overall Radio 2 chief Lesley Douglas, who resigned at the end of last month as media interest in the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross routine, which involved leaving lewd messages on the voicemail of actor Andrew Sachs, reached its peak. As previously reported, Brand also resigned his Radio 2 show while Ross is on a three month unpaid suspension.
It was the "compliance" bit of Barber's job that caused problems - it was his job to ensure no content aired by the station breaches the BBC's own guidelines on taste and decency. It's not clear who in the Radio 2 hierarchy was actually aware of the pre-recorded Brand/Ross phone calls before they aired, but it is now known the matter went higher than the producer Nic Philps, and gossipers are suggesting that both Barber and Douglas were aware of the nature of the pre-recorded show before it aired, even if they hadn't actually heard what aired.
The ongoing internal investigation may reveal more. It's thought that a lot of the mess came about because of confusion during a phone conversation between Sachs and Philps after the show had been recorded but before it aired. Philps made contact with the actor about the answer phone messages, which Sachs says he could hardly make out when he received them on his mobile, but which he thought sounded "a bit off". It was arranged that Sachs would appear on Brand's show the following week, which Sachs understood would air instead of the answer phone messages, whereas Philps seems to have thought it was agreed the actual interview would be a next-week follow-up to the phone message links. Either way, the Mail On Sunday had the story before the actual interview with Sachs could be recorded.
Whoever did sign off the Brand show in the Radio 2 hierarchy may well have had an involvement in the cutting of some even more risque comments made by Brand and Ross as they spoke about Sachs and his granddaughter Georgina Baillie. It's been known since the whole scandal kicked off that some Brand/Ross banter had been cut from the programme that aired, and Brand himself has admitted that was so in an interview with the Observer this weekend. In that interview Brand admitted the whole thing was a mistake, but added that there was no malice intended in what he and Ross said. He told the paper: "What's difficult about the whole thing is that it was completely devoid of malice, and there's been a retrospective application of cruelty and intention to cause offence".
Barber's resignation and Brand's Observer interview came as the BBC broadcast a formal apology on Radio 2 at the start of the programming slots that would previously have carried Ross and Brand's shows. Even that caused problems for the Beeb after Sachs complained the apology didn't specifically mention his wife or his family in the list of people they were apologising to. The station had to quickly re-record the sorry message for its evening airing.
And that's all the Sachsgate news I have for now, you'll be pleased to hear no doubt. Oh, except to say that a Music Week survey has shown wide disappointment in the music industry to the aforementioned Lesley Douglas' departure from Radio 2 as a result of the whole affair. She is popular at many record labels for further expanding Radio 2's position as a credible home for new artists, and for her role in creating the albeit niche serious music station 6Music. 97% of those Music Week readers who took part in a survey about Douglas' departure said the Beeb should not have accepted her resignation, though presumably anyone in the music industry who has to field enquiries from a hostile press from time to time will appreciate why they did.