When Jeremy Paxman used Edinburgh’s annual MacTaggart Lecture to fire a fusillade against the “laughable”, “preposterous” and “vacuous” state of British broadcasting, he cautioned that the battle was on for the future of quality television. But he could scarcely have dreamt that he would be the first casualty.

Deploying an armoury every bit as explosive against Paxman - “a vandal”, “a savage” and “a beating prefect” - the veteran film-maker Stephen Frears put up a stout defence of British television yesterday and launched a broadside against the Newsnight presenter himself.

In Edinburgh to deliver a master-class on film-making, Frears said that he had been appalled by Paxman’s lecture at the International Television Festival, which compared the BBC to Stalin’s Russia and suggested that the licence fee was outdated.

He questioned Paxman’s qualifications for launching such an attack, given the “idiotic, public school” attitudes that the presenter had made famous in his interviews. Frears had been particularly incensed by an abrasive discussion between the presenter and Sir Richard Eyre, which was screened at the end of last month to commemorate the death of the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman.

“Paxman’s a vandal, a sort of Viking, an absolute savage. He should be taken out and shot. He’s like something out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Not Ned East either, not Tom Brown. He’s Flashman, a beating prefect,” said Frears.

In the Newsnight interview, the theatre and film director Eyre had said that he judged Bergman to be one of the three or four greatest artists of the 20th century, prompting a withering response from Paxman: “He wasn’t exactly box office.” “The way he treated Richard Eyre about Bergman was just dreadful, like some public school hoo-ray idiot,” said Frears.

Paxman was promoting his latest book, On Royalty, at yesterday’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, and though it has been well reviewed, Frears suggested that it was unlikely to have the impact of his own 2006 film The Queen, which won an Oscar for its star, Helen Mirren, and was nominated in five other categories, including Best Film and Best Director.

“I wish he had taken me on,” said Frears. “I would have asked him what his book on the Queen grossed. Or indeed how he would justify News-nightin the age of Blockbuster video.”

Frears, 66, has enjoyed huge success with his feature films since My Beautiful Laundrette was released in 1985, but the director’s pedigree was established in television from the 1960s with a succession of small-screen plays and films.

He acknowledged that it had been easier to make television films in the 1960s and 1970s, and that changing public tastes meant that less drama was commissioned.

“It’s tough, but there’s no law that says people have to be interested in what I am doing. You have to earn their interest,” he said.

He said that he still enjoyed British broadcasting. He admired the documentary films of Adam Curtis, whose three-part series The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom had been “sensational” when it was screened in the spring.

Editor's choice

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