The furore over offensive phone calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to actor Andrew Sachs shows how society has forgotten how to behave itself, the Independent said in an editorial.

“Exactly what has happened to good manners and basic courtesy,” it asked on its leader page. “And isn’t it time they made a return?

The episode casts Britain in a “very shabby light” and raised the question: should a public service broadcaster employ such individuals, the paper added.

The incident was “ugly, cheap and nasty” and highlights a wider issue of falling standards in modern broadcasting, wrote John Harris in a column for the Guardian.

“Perhaps the spectral presence of Mary Whitehouse has hung around our discourse on broadcasting for too long,” he wrote. “Agreeing that too much TV is getting ever more coarse and idiotic doesn’t strike me as a sop to the authoritarian right.”

The Times used its august leader columns to discuss the incident under the headline “A Sorry Affair”, the same headline used by its sister paper The Sun in its “Sun Says” column.

“Some will say that humour that doesn’t offend isn’t humour,” the Times said. “Cutting humour is designed to draw blood. Lenny Bruce drew plenty. But there is a wide gulf between comedy and malice.”

The editors’ failure to delete the offending section of Brand’s pre-recorded show before it was broadcast “should mortify the BBC”, it added.

“SACK THEM!” screamed the front page headline in the Daily Mail.

“Even by the standards of this puerile, smutty pair, this was a disgusting and gratuitously cruel way to a treat 78-year-old Andrew Sachs,” the paper said in an editorial.

“Is there any reason why we should be expected to go on paying this vile man (Brand) - or the executives who judge his filth fit to broadcast?”