After a week of madness, finally a shockingly sensible response from the BBC.
A 12-week suspension for Jonathan Ross feels, oddly, about right. Suspension without pay actually claws back some of the BBC licence fee money the nation is constantly asked to be outraged about paying him.
He gets to lie low and stay out of trouble but can't go and work for any other broadcaster. He can come back after Christmas and, you never know, we might be a bit more grateful to have him back.
Will the BBC be renewing his contract at anything like the same level next year? No.
Ross survives on "a final warning". He's not only too expensive to sack, he's too valuable to every rival the BBC has.
Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas is sacrificed, despite Russell Brand's best attempts to take one for the team by resigning himself, yesterday.
Finally, light dawns and we can understand the justification for those inflated BBC executive salaries: the job is actually considerably more perilous than it appears. Prior to Hutton, the catchphrase at the corporation was "deputy heads will roll".
However, it's as if, since Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke had to leave over a row with Alastair Campbell, all sense of proportion has been lost and any incident must be accompanied by at least one resignation to have any impact whatsoever.
And Douglas, genuinely a very talented executive who has run a largely successful station - the most listened to in the UK - has resigned to protect her programming teams.
On Friday we will find out exactly who listened to what when and ticked which box, but Mark Thompson admitted on BBC News channel that Douglas had not personally heard the show before the broadcast.
We all know what she's done – she's resigned to save that 25-year-old producer, the senior compliance officer and the head of programmes who've been pictured in every paper for the past three days. It's still surprising and always worth noting and admiring when executives do the right thing.
Losing Douglas is a flesh wound to the corporation on a par with the departure of Peter Fincham - the controller of BBC1 who fell on his sword out of a similar sense of responsibility for the output of his network.
On this evidence, being a successful network controller is a far riskier business than, say, a more senior executive responsible for the channels. Douglas will doubtless do very well and earn buckets of cash elsewhere but she has been robbed of a station she cherished, as head of programmes and then controller, for eight years. She will be greatly missed.
