Also, it wasn't live and was aired two days later it was recorded.
That just means that the producer needs to be reprimanded too.
Absolutely! When I made the comment about the producer upthread, I had assumed that it was live, and I know ho whard it is to rein in 'the talent' when in full flow...
Knowing that it was pre-recorded implicates producers, editors and management, any of whom could have raised concerns.
In general: there is a limit. Just because some people find something funny, this in itself does not provide any ethical justification for the action. Simply put, humour on its own is not a defence. It's not 'edgy' (because that would imply some kind of intelligent politics at work), it was both crass and wrong. Anyone with a working brain should have been able to see that. I suspect that when you are being paid £6M a year, ethics tend to disappear off your radar, however...
This is an important point, well distilled, I think. Humour should sometimes make us feel uneasy, and there is a place for roping in people in the public eye in a consensual way (eg Dead Ringers' hilarious telephone calls where Jon Culshaw, as Tom Baker, rang Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy - both pre-recorded,and both cleared by the subjects before transmission). There's also a case for taking comedy towards limits. Mark Thomas is a brilliant example of this, with political stunts as public comedic theatre. Sacha Baron Cohen - not a performer I admire because of his lazy racism - has dealt with the outer edges of embarrassment through Ali G etc, though he did, again, get permission from his victims. Chris Morris was vicious in his attacks on hype & scaremongering, but it worked - both to provoke deep unease and laughs.
Have any of these crossed the line? Did Stewart Lee, with his Jerry Springer? Maybe, but there are crossover points between humour, which is often a release of tension at the inappropriate, offence, and that ill-defined area I would regard as too far. Ross & Brand are in the last.
Incidentally, I was listening to The Goon Show last night. It was one of Spike's more chaotic episodes, from about 1958. There were a series of jokes that would have offended a lot of people at the time, and, if they had been noticed, I am pretty sure they would not have been allowed.