The licence fee will soon be indefensible if the BBC does not maintain quality by investing in its flagship programmes, Jeremy Paxman claimed yesterday.

The presenter of Newsnight gave warning that the BBC’s licence fee funding would become a thing of the past unless it was able to articulate “a clear sense of purpose and express it through much better protection of the defining brands”.

Speaking before an audience at the Edinburgh Television Festival, he predicted that there would probably be “one more licence fee settlement” but said that it would be “foolish to be too confident” that there would be a fourth or fifth to follow. He also high-lighted worries about a decline of standards in television, including the phone-in scandals on Blue Peter, Comic Relief and Children in Need.

Paxman said that working at the BBC “has always been a bit like working in Stalin’s Russia, with one five-year plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another” with a belief that “the system will go on for ever”.

He said that the “idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s” and created a risk that BBC could follow the British Empire into obsolescence. “It is too easy to imagine a future in which our grand-children will talk of having had an ancestor who worked for the BBC in the same way as people nowadays mention having a great-grandparent who worked for the Sudanese Political Service,” he added.

In an unprecedented attack on his employers, Paxman criticised BBC executives for allowing themselves to be “comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Treasury” during the latest licence fee negotiations. He said that Mark Thompson, the Director-General, had undermined the corporation’s ability to “produce worthwhile programmes” by agreeing to spend £1.5 billion on the switch to digital by 2012 and moving children’s and sports programming to Salford.

He said that if cost-cutting continued the corporation was in danger of forgetting its “sole purpose” – making worthwhile programmes. As an example, he said that Newsnight had been required to make budget cuts of 15 per cent in the past three years, and would have to make cuts of “at least a further 20 per cent over the next five years”, which would lead to an inevitable loss in quality.

Paxman also asked whether there was enough news to sustain the “portentous immediacy” that 24-hour news channels require. Complaining that all “news programmes need to make noise”, he gave an example of an interview with a woman during the Suffolk bird-flu crisis as the “nadir” of excitable journalism.

“The reporter knew what was wanted. ‘We have a dead chicken over there’, the woman wailed. ‘Whether that chicken was knocked down by a car we don’t know’. And that was it. There was a dead chicken in Suffolk.” Paxman said that he agreed with Tony Blair’s criticisms of the media for being dominated by a herd mentality.

At a question-and-answer session after the speech, Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC chairman, asked the presenter what he would actually change about the corporation. Paxman replied that channel controllers should give producers a better sense of what they want. Last night a spokesman for the BBC said: “We welcome Jeremy’s contribution to this important debate.”

Meanwhile it was announced that Mr Thompson, Michael Grade, the ITV chairman, and Andy Duncan, the boss of Channel 4, had agreed to hold a summit on raising standards.

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