Michael Grade, the executive chairman of ITV, took a swipe at his old employers at the BBC today when he criticised the producers of Blue Peter for covering up the death of a puppy 45 years ago.

Mr Grade's comments came in a speech to the Royal Television Society in which he condemned the recent premium rate telephone scandal that hit British broadcasters and called for a 'zero tolerance' approach to deliberate deceit of the viewer.

The phone scam scandal dragged in shows from all the major channels, including Channel 4's Richard & Judy, ITV's The X Factor and BBC's Saturday Kitchen.

Most bizarrely, it also caught up Blue Peter, the BBC's flagship children's show, which has now banned phone-in competitions after a review showing that thousands of children had taken part in contests that they had had no chance of winning. On one occasion, a rattled producer asked a child chosen at random from a group visiting the Blue Peter set to pose as a competition winner, when the phone lines were jammed and genuine callers couldn't get through.

But, according to Mr Grade, who resigned as chairman of the BBC board of governors last November to take over at ITV, the rot set in well before premium rate numbers were even invented.

"Long before the recent case of Blue Peter picking a supposed phone-in winnner from children who happened to be on a studio visit - back in 1962 in fact - it probably seemed a good idea for the then producers of the programme to conceal the fact that Petra the dog had died and substitute a lookalike puppy," the ITV chief said today.

"Why upset the children? Why have the bother of explaining? But those children are today's adult viewers, who now know that something they implicitly trusted from the BBC was not true, and that by extension what you see on television broadcasting can be a deception."

The story of Petra the dog - it only emerged in the 1990s that the original Petra had died of distemper as a puppy and was quietly replaced - was far from the only example chosen by Mr Grade of broadcaster deceit. It was probably, however, the least diplomatic given that the Blue Peter producer at the time, Biddy Baxter, is a fellow of the RTS.

Mr Grade also told the story - which he referred to as an "industry folk myth" - of a 1960s TV reporter who would send back reports from the world's trouble spots with the instruction "dub on gunfire" and also recalled more recent cases, including a faked Sky News report from Iraq in 2003.

He also recalled how he had been Director of Programmes at LWT during the 1970s, the heyday of televised wrestling.

"It purported to be a sport, albeit with outrageous and colourful contestants. In fact it was highly rehearsed and we casually assumed an open secret with the audience: not real sport, but entertainment," he said.

"Nearly 30 years on and I'm not so sure about that. I don't know, looking back through the mists of time, whether the readings on Hughie Green's "clapometer", had any factual basis at all."

"Deceit is not only embarrassing when it is revealed. It is also corrosive of attitudes to the public. It holds viewers in contempt. It sees them .... merely aggregated as ratings, not as individuals.

He added: "The trust that the public has generally shown for British broadcasting in the past is going to be one of our key assets in the cacophony of images and noises that is going to characterise the maturing digital world.

"It’s not always going to be as easy as it was to deliver, but we would be crazy to start cutting corners now, and debase that asset. My argument is that we should be doing the exact opposite, and cleaning up our act now. It’s the clever thing to do. It’s also the right thing to do. It’s time we re-established the primacy of that 'contract of trust' with our audiences – and stick to it."

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