Et tu, Pudsey? Today’s revelations from the BBC’s own internal inquiry into the editorial standards of its programme makers could hardly be more damaging. For afternoon quiz shows and Saturday morning cooking competitions casually to cheat their audiences is one thing, but for Children in Need, that annual good deed in the naughty world of television, to have misled its own donors – that’s the us who last year raised more than £30 million for its charities – will shock even its most cynical critics.

The BBC’s executive says it trawled a million hours of its output since January 2005. It issued an “amnesty” to producers who wanted to fess up. In that context for the trawl to have netted dup only half a dozen scams would have been reassuring were it not for context: last week’s unprecedented Ofcom fine for Blue Peter; the equally unprecedented apology offered to the Queen for making a soap opera out of a moment of royal irritation; and Ofcom’s complaint, only this morning, of a “systemic failure” in the way TV runs premium rate services.

In the BBC’s defence, there is no question, as in the case of the commercial malefactors, that it has cheated out of greed. That a recorded Liz Kershaw programme on BBC 6 Music bothered to fake a live phone-in - the phonees were her producers and pals – is as much an example of naivety as cupidity. But the variety of sleights of hand by the Corporation that has been uncovered in the past seven days is what hurts it. A press preview, a children’s programme, the World Service, a Newsnight report, and now Children in Need, Comic Relief, Sports Relief – these examples suggest that a maverick culture, already rampant in the independent sector, has spread to many corners of the BBC. Young people, barely trained and under-supervised, have made a mockery of the standards that are supposed to be uniquely held by the nation’s prime public service broadcaster. It looks very much as if BBC has started treating licence-payers as punters,

I suggested this week in my Times television column that the next time the BBC was found cheating its Director-General, Mark Thompson, should be filmed apologising on his knees to the Queen (and not just when she is its victim). The good news is that the new BBC Trust appears to be an even frostier patron than Her Majesty. Far less on-side than the old Board of Governors tended to be, today the Trust is angry and demanded action. Thompson, to his credit, is acting. He may, by banning all phone competitions across the BBC, even be over-reacting. But he knows that until trust is restored, the public face of the BBC will remain as battered as Pudsey’s.

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