Jeremy Paxman has criticised the BBC for being 'biased and politically correct' and called for the licence fee to be abolished because 'if Amazon and Netflix can do it, so can they.'

The former BBC man and Newsnight presenter, 67, also criticised the public service broadcaster for focusing stories on 'the disabled refugee from Syria' rather than examining how managing a disabled refugee's needs might affect British taxpayers.

In an interview with the Sunday Times Magazine, he said that although he still thought the BBC was a a good thing, he now much prefers Channel 4, praising its 'clarity.'

Jeremy Paxman, 67, criticised the BBC for focusing on 'the disabled Syrian refugee' rather than examining how managing a disabled refugee's needs might affect British taxpayers

He said that the BBC can fall victim to 'endless meetings with executives you've never heard of and don't know what they do' but that Channel 4 had a 'perfectly clear' editorial structure.

He said that the public service broadcaster was a 'politically correct, parastatal organisation' and that the world was not particularly improved by its existence.

He also slammed its 'partiality' and said that there is a 'way of looking at the world' if you work at the BBC which he labelled as a 'metropolitan, elite problem.'

He said that TV executives needed to understand that people did not want to be dictated to about what times they could watch certain shows and on-demand viewing was the future although some 'schedulers still have their malign influences.'

He also slammed the licence fee as 'completely antediluvian, a tax on one piece of electronic equipment.'

'There's no tax on that camera over there, or that computer,' he said.

'Some other mechanism has to be found. If Amazon and Netflix can do that, it's not beyond the BBC to do the same thing,' he said.

Paxman's less than charitable views on the public service broadcaster had been aired briefly before.

In 2014, while speaking at the Chalke Valley History Festival, he mentioned that Newsnight was made by 'idealistic 13-year-olds' who 'think they can change the world.'

For more details on the Paxman interview see this weekend's Sunday Times Magazine.