If something touches on an unusual sensitivity, there is always someone more senior who is standing there waiting for the buck to be passed. But the system works only if senior people are sensitised to what might upset the audience. Radio Two's management, it seems, were so bewitched by the degenerate duo that they showed every sign of not understanding what they had done wrong when the story was first picked up by the Mail on Sunday. As it slowly dawned that calling up a septuagenarian and shouting down the phone about going to bed with his granddaughter is not everyone's idea of funny, the system started to react. The problem was referred up the chain of command - and nothing happened.

There was a simple reason for that: the management chain in Light Entertainment is pretty short - unlike, for instance, News and Current Affairs, where there might be as many as ten steps between a producer and the lofty personage called Head of News - so very rapidly it landed on the desk of the Radio Two Controller, Lesley Douglas. But Russell Brand was her special pet. She appointed him and earned much praise for offering up such "edgy" entertainment; she was the last person who was going to disown or discipline him.

So Ms Douglas, under pressure from a now thoroughly alarmed senior management, referred it up the next management ladder. And for days they were all struck dumb. What, you might ask, was the Deputy Director-General, Mark Byford, doing while the fires of public outrage burned ever brighter? Not a lot, it would seem. Not a peep from him. He could have (many would say should have) stepped in and spoken before then - after all, isn't that what deputies are for? - but he didn't. Which set the scene for Thompson to arrive, like the US Cavalry, to rescue the situation at the very last.