While the rest of us shelter from another horrible domestic summer, lucky BBC executives have been relaxing by the Mediterranean. A Freedom of Information request by the Guardian has revealed that the corporation has been using a distant sun-kissed villa as a base for entertaining.

We learn that for years the corporation has regularly hired Mickie Most's old villa, at a cost to date of £90,530, raising the question of "whether it is really necessary for the BBC to commit that amount of money", as John Whittingdale, the Tory chairman of the Commons culture and media committee, puts it. "At a time when the BBC claims to be short of cash, it does seem somewhat extravagant," he says. And his colleague Ed Vaizey, the shadow media and arts spokesman, sends a starker message by saying he wants to freeze the licence fee and to sell off Radio 1.

Whenever another drama erupts around the BBC, preordained positions are taken up again, for and against. The Daily Mail and the Murdoch press never miss an opportunity to give the corporation a kicking, while for some on the liberal left it's an instinctive reflex to defend the BBC as a great national institution. Indeed it is that – even now. But whatever the motives of the BBC's enemies, those reflexive apologists haven't noticed how far it has changed, in a way that reflects the spirit of the age as much as greedy bankers or corrupt MPs, and which invites serious, disinterested criticism.

Once upon a time the BBC was rather a puritanical sort of organisation, and I don't just mean the stern Sir John Reith's insistence that adultery was a sacking offence. Nobody used to join the corporation to get rich. That didn't stop it attracting plenty of talent. I well remember how BBC traineeships were the hottest, most sought-after ambition for graduates in the late 1960s. They were ambitious, that is, to make good programmes, have fun and, no doubt, meet glamorous, liberated girls – but not to make a pile.

Since then we've lived through the enrichissez-vous Thatcherite decade, with what the patrician high Tory Sir Peregrine Worsthorne memorably called its bourgeois triumphalism, and then a new Labour government totally relaxed about people becoming filthy rich. After that, even if we're disgusted by the greed of bankers, we aren't necessarily surprised. But is it any more surprising if the same spirit has infected parliament – and broadcasting?

In truth, that has happened at the BBC on a dramatic scale. A comparison of the incomes of public figures between half a century ago and now is instructive. In 1958 the salaries of the prime minister, the lord chief justice and the director general of the BBC were easy to remember as they were all the same, £10,000 a year. Last year the prime minister was paid £189,994, the lord chief justice £236,300 – and the director general £816,000 (plus bonuses).

There are now at least 47 BBC executives paid more than the prime minister. Everyone who works in the media has heard the stories about people retiring early from the BBC with personal pension pots of anything between £4m and £8m, and the their expenses must have impressed even MPs adept at claiming for champagne flutes or "flipping" residences.

The director general himself is defiant. An unabashed Mark Thompson says he is good value for money, and that he could earn far more elsewhere. That's what senior BBC executives all tell us, but is it true even in its own terms? Max Hastings has said that when he was a newspaper editor he wouldn't have hired some of the BBC personnel he met in any capacity or for any salary.

And David Elstein, the former chief executive of Channel 5, described Thompson's claim as "complete nonsense". There is no true comparison between the BBC and commercial companies, Elstein says. "At the BBC you have effectively got security for life, a gold-plated pension, you've got wonderful perks and security of revenues into the distant future. None of that applies in the private sector."

What the BBC's defenders fail to notice is that contradictory arguments are invoked on its behalf. In America they say that the Republican party's creed is "Free enterprise for the poor, socialism for the rich". Selfish "welfare moms" have their benefit cut, but billions of dollars are given in subsidies to rich cotton farmers, while Wall Street is bailed out by the taxpayer – after vast bonuses have been pocketed, and before, as it transpires, they are pocketed all over again.

That happened here too, of course. As Vince Cable has said with his usual lucidity (why isn't he leader of the Liberal Democrats, or chancellor?), it's intolerable, not to say simply absurd, for these City slickers to claim they deserve their bonuses once more after they have been rescued from the brink by the rest of us. The bankers have had a wonderful each-way deal. When profits roll in, they take the winnings; when losses engulf them, the taxpayer foots the bill. If only one could have an arrangement with the bookmakers like that.

And yet the BBC also uses two standards, in a way not dissimilar to the Republicans: public service broadcasting principles when it comes to collecting revenue, but the free market when it comes to paying the DG, or Jonathan Ross. However objectionable Ross is, his money would be his own business if he made it in a true marketplace, like Jeffrey Archer or Didier Drogba. But he doesn't. We pay him £3m a year whether we like it or not. What Thompson and his colleagues conveniently forget when defending their salaries and contracts is that the licence fee is a form of taxation, not to say a regressive poll tax. They forget that the BBC is a public corporation, and its employees public officials. Isn't it time they started behaving in a public spirit?

This is written with a tinge of regret. I was formed by the BBC, from the Third Programme to Panorama, not to say from Take It from Here to Round the Horne, and from Test Match Special to Match of the Day.

But a sharp culture shock is now needed. Those rapacious bankers have it coming, as well as the light-fingered MPs, but then so do Thompson and his colleagues, with their villas, cashmere socks and pension pots. If they are wise, they will anticipate the coming age of austerity, before it hits them hard.