Off the air

British comedian Russell Brand quit his BBC radio show yesterday after he and fellow performer Jonathan Ross were suspended indefinitely for leaving lewd messages on the voice mail of a 78-year-old actor. The calls to Andrew Sachs - best known for playing Spanish waiter Manuel in the 1970s Britcom "Fawlty Towers" - have drawn more than 18,000 complaints, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the comments "inappropriate and unacceptable." In the messages, the pair claimed Brand had slept with Sachs's granddaughter Georgina Baillie and joked that Sachs might hang himself as a result of the news. Baillie, a 23-year-old burlesque performer, acknowledged she had a sexual relationship with Brand but said the calls to her grandfather were "cruel." (AP)

Janet Jackson had to exert a little extra "Discipline" during her concert Tuesday night in suburban Detroit. The singer trimmed a three-song section of her "Rock Witchu Tour" show, including the sexually explicit "Discipline," in order to comply with a Michigan state law prohibiting simulated sex acts in a public performing space. During the segment, Jackson usually pulls a male fan from the crowd, ties him down, and "molests" him while her dancers mime various sexual acts. (Billboard)

A tearful Carol Alt said she's happy that a judge's ruling that her ex-husband doesn't owe her money frees her from the longest relationship of her life. The model and actress commented outside federal court in Manhattan after a judge yesterday said she waited too long to claim former New York Rangers defenseman Ron Greschner owed her money. Judge Colleen McMahon said Alt otherwise would have been entitled to $165,000 from the sale of their shares in a water filtration company. (AP)

A prosecutor yesterday portrayed Phil Spector as a man who repeatedly threatened women with guns and could become "very sinister, very violent, and very deadly" when he was drunk. Prosecutor Alan Jackson set his sights on the defendant during his opening statement in Spector's retrial on a murder charge in the 2003 death of actress Lana Clarkson. Prosecutors claim Spector shot her after she resisted his sexual advances. (AP)

Disgraced track star Marion Jones says she often thinks she would have won gold medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics even if she hadn't taken a designer steroid known as "the clear." "I'll ask myself, 'Well, if you hadn't been given "the clear" do you think you would've won?' " Jones said on an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" broadcast yesterday, her first post-prison interview. "I usually answer, 'Yes.' " Jones, 33, apologized to her teammates and tearfully read a letter she wrote in prison, in which she told her children she lied to prosecutors because she didn't love herself enough to tell the truth. (AP)

"This was my dad, this was Elvis coming through." - Lisa Marie Presley, telling Britain's Daily Star that a medium put her in touch with her father so she could introduce her newborn twins to him