Top Gear was “an accident waiting to happen”, said Lorraine Heggessey, who told the audience enjoying her RTS London Christmas Lecture that she would have dealt with the programme’s presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, more quickly.

“Jeremy is a bit like a spoiled toddler,” she said. He had “crossed the line several times with quite racist remarks and got away with it”, added the former BBC and TalkbackThames executive.

Referring to the incident in March when Clarkson launched a physical and verbal attack on a member of the show’s production team, Heggessey added: “[He] crossed the line from which there’s no return.”

“I know the BBC wanted to have an inquiry,” she continued, “but I would have thought you could have had your inquiry in a day and made a decision.” Clarkson was not dropped from BBC Two’s hit motoring series until more than two weeks after his suspension.

When Heggessey ran the BBC’s children’s department in the late 1990s she acted swiftly when faced with a serious disciplinary problem. She sacked Blue Peter presenter Richard Bacon after The News of the World exposed him for taking cocaine. “Crises never go away,” she said, “they only get bigger. So, you do need to move quickly.”

Heggessey mounted a strong defence of the public-­service values of the BBC and Channel 4. “Good television costs money,” she said. “Pretty much since I left the BBC in 2005 there has been an endless round of cuts and redundancies, which is not the best way to foster creativity and boost morale.”

“Privatisation of C4 has sneaked on to the agenda,” she said, adding that it had been done in an “underhand” way. “To start proposing a major change like this at a time when the DCMS has refused to extend Terry Burns’s tenure so that C4 is essentially without a chair, and when everyone is focused on the BBC licence-fee, makes it seem like the DCMS is trying to pull a fast one.”

Looking back over 30-odd years in TV, Heggessey recalled some of her stranger moments, including breastfeeding while interviewing notorious gangster “Mad” Frankie Fraser and giving door-stepping reporter Roger Cook – who reacted furiously – a taste of his own medicine.

She joined the BBC as a news trainee in 1979, working on Newsnight and then Panorama, which was known by insiders as, variously, “Piranha Tank” or “Paranoia”. Heggessey said: “The maxim of most producers was, ‘It’s not enough to succeed; those around you must fail.'”

Following a stretch freelancing – during which she made the Hard News programme for C4 about Cook – she returned to the corporation, producing BBC One’s The Underworld crime series, which featured the interview with Fraser.