The BBC presenter Jo Whiley should have made an immediate apology to viewers after the singer Iggy Pop used the phrase “paki shop” in a live Glastonbury Festival interview, Ofcom has said.

The regulator criticised the BBC’s response to the lapse, which occurred in a late-night televison interview with the controversial performer. Pop told Whiley that his transparent trousers solicited admiring glances when he walked “down Camden High Street at a paki shop”.

The BBC said that the veteran American punk star, 60, was “probably unaware that a term commonly used 30 years ago has now passed out of ‘polite usage’.”

Ofcom said that the term “paki” was “racial abuse which is generally considered very offensive”. Although the term was not intended to be pejorative, its use was offensive.

The BBC said that the programme’s producers discussed Pop’s appearance when the BBC Two show came off-air and concluded that the presenter should have been told to apologise at the time. An apology was issued later that day on the BBC News website in the light of complaints made directly to the BBC.

— Jools Holland, the presenter who in 1987 was removed from The Tubeafter swearing during a live tea-time trailer for the show has criticised the amount of swearing on modern television.

The BBC Two presenter told Radio Times that standards of language had fallen. “Where’s the Independent Broadcasting Authority now we need it, when the world’s falling apart?” he said.

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