BBC apology over horse in pub joke

Do you think the Brand/Ross calls were actually left on Andrew Sachs’s answer phone?
I don’t.
On Wednesday morning Absolute radio’s filthy shock jock Tim Shaw was on TV defending the dirty duo.
He said that he never really made crank calls. He just recorded the voicemail message and then put his own rantings on the tape afterwards.
Last night on Five Live radio comedy writer Steve Punt was going on about the fact that Andrew Sachs said he first heard the calls in his agent’s office.
That was after the Mail on Sunday had alerted them to the Brand show podcast.
If those calls were on the answerphone, said Punt, how come Sachs hadn’t already spoken to his agent about it?
The writer told host Richard Bacon that he was almost certain there was more to come out – but he didn’t want to say it on air.
Have the BBC got themselves into a muddle about what’s worse – leaving obscene messages on an old man’s answer phone, or conning the audience about leaving obscene messages on an old man’s answer phone?
Surely no-one expects light entertainment to all be entirely true.
Imagine the apologies.
“The BBC would like to point out that when, during Seaside Special in 1977, Frank Carson claimed a horse went into a pub and the barman said ‘Why the long face?’ - no such incident ever took place.
“Mr Carson has apologised to the equine community and the licensed trade. And every BBC Director General during and since the incident has been stripped of their pension rights.”