Tom Cruise was today confirmed as the star guest on Jonathan Ross’s first Friday night show after his suspension over the obscene phone calls row.Cruise will appear on the pre-recorded show, to be screened on January 23, alongside Stephen Fry and Lee Evans, the BBC said in a statement.
Cruise will not receive any payment for his appearance on the show as part of the promotion of his new film, Valkyrie, which tells the story of a plot to kill Hitler at the height of the Second World War.
It had been speculated that that the actor had had second thoughts about appearing on the programme after learning of the lewd calls Ross and Russell Brand made to the veteran actor Andrew Sachs in October that led to more than 40,000 public complaints.
The BBC insists that it is not experiencing problems tempting high-profile guests to appear on the new run of Ross’s programme, which has been off air during his 12-week suspension from the corporation.Ross wrote on Twitter, the blogging website, that he was “off to sue” a downmarket newspaper that had claimed that James Bond actor Daniel Craig was refusing to appear on his show because of his behaviour.
“He’ll do the show again, no problem,” Ross wrote. “Usual third-rate lies from hacks.”The BBC insists that Ross’s return to the airwaves will be “business as usual”. In November Jana Bennett, head of television output at the corporation, said that the presenter had already been told to cut back on swearing after an incident involving Gwyneth Paltrow, in May last year.
Ross told the actress that he would “f***” her and that she was “clearly gagging for it”, which the corporation’s governing body, the BBC Trust, later said was "gratuitous and unnecessarily offensive".Ms Bennett said: “There was a mutual thing to push back on the language. We didn't want to get into a situation where we were pushing away part of the audience of the show."
Franz Ferdinand, the Scottish rock band, will also feature in the comeback show, performing their new single, Ulysses. The corporation is poised to announce a big name guest for the next show in the series tomorrow morning.
Ross kept his £6 million-a-year job at the BBC despite shouting into Sachs’s answer machine that Brand had “f*****” Georgina Baillie, the actor’s 23-year-old granddaughter. Brand resigned over the incident, as did Lesley Douglas, the controller of Radio 2.
Ross’s Radio 2 show will be back on January 24 and he will resume presenting BBC1’s Film 2009 on January 26.Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, sent an e-mail to all staff today ordering them to sign a form to promise to keep up to date with the corporation’s editorial guidelines, in the wake of the scandal.
Mr Thompson wrote: “Occasionally I still hear programme-makers talking about this issue as if it was just about the process of 'compliance' and was entirely about form-filling or some other kind of bureaucratic process. It really isn't.
“Procedures are inevitably part of the way in which we ensure that our output meets the right standards and it's important that, when there is a mandatory procedure, everyone follows it.”He added that all staff will be required once a year to “register their acknowledgement of this important obligation” to be aware of the guidelines.