The BBC One controller Peter Fincham rejected calls to resign today after being forced to apologise to the Royal Family for misrepresenting the Queen.

In a series of television interviews this morning, Mr Fincham claimed that he had briefed journalists in good faith this week that the Queen had walked out "in a huff" during a BBC1 fly-on-the-wall documentary, which is due to be screened this autumn.

He said that he had no way of knowing that the scene of Her Majesty's apparent walkout - in a promotional video given to the corporation by the independent programme makers RDF Media - had been inserted in the wrong place.

As a result, the scene during the documentary which appeared to show the Queen storming out of a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz was, in fact, a shot of her walking in, and the supposed walkout never happened.

There have been calls for an inquiry after the BBC was forced to apologise to the Queen, and the BBC Trust has demanded an explanation from the director general, Mark Thompson.

Mr Fincham said this morning, however, that he would not resign unless Mr Thompson asked him to.

“If Mark Thompson wants me to resign, I will, of course, do so. As a matter of fact, Mark Thompson has sent me a message of support in this, that he doesn’t want me to resign," he told BBC Breakfast.

"A mistake was made down the line. We were supplied by an outside company with footage that, extremely regrettably, misrepresented a scene involving the Queen.

“We are obviously not very happy about that, but that is, in fact, what happened.”

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Fincham added that it was wrong to link what he claimed was an honest mistake together with other high-profile incidents of misleading viewers, including the £50,000 fine dealt out to the BBC by Ofcom for fabricating the results of a Blue Peter premium-rate phone-in competition, in which 40,000 children had entered.

“This was not a case of misleading viewers," he said. "It’s been linked, of course, to other incidents which have happened lately, but it is in a different category."

Mr Fincham won backing from the former BBC chairman, Michael Grade, this morning, who claimed that media organisations were increasingly at the whim of young producers who did not properly understand the necessity to tell audiences the truth and edit accurately.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010