CURRENT and former senior BBC executives came under intense fire from MPs as they were grilled about the pay-off scandal which has engulfed the broadcaster.

Amid extraordinary scenes which were often chaotic, former director-general Mark Thompson, one of seven witnesses to appear before the Public Accounts Committee, was forced to deny a charge that the broadcaster had "lost the plot" when it gave almost £1 million to his former deputy, Mark Byford.

MPs are furious that dozens of staff were given payments far above what their contracts demanded.

One committee member Chris Heaton-Harris said that meeting was the "most bizarre game of whack-a-mole I've ever seen in my life, where you hit one fact down and it throws up other questions".

The committee's chairwoman, Margaret Hodge, said the hearing was an "unedifying occasion which can only damage the standing and the reputation of the BBC".

She added: "At best what we've seen is incompetence, lack of central control, a failure to communicate. At worst we may have seen people covering their backs by being less than open. That is not good."

Even before the hearing started Downing Street had raised the stakes saying that executives had "legitimate questions to answer" on the payments.

As well as the £1m settlement to Mr Byford the BBC also gave a £390,000 pay-off to Sharon Baylay, its former director of marketing.

During the hearing Mrs Hodge asked Mr Thompson why Mr Byford needed a payment double what was contractually due.

"Why was £500,000, which is for most people mega bucks, not enough?" she demanded.

The BBC's director of human resources, Lucy Adams, also came under fire after she said the payment was part of a plan to cut numbers of senior staff without causing too much disruption.

Mrs Hodge told her: "This attitude that the top cadre of people at the BBC faced greater difficulty when they faced redundancy rather than a receptionist or someone lower down is offensive, just offensive."

In another heated exchange, Ms Hodge told Ms Adams: "I'm not having any more lies this afternoon."

Mrs Adams, who last month announced her decision to leave the BBC, has in recent days admitted writing a memo she told MPs at an earlier hearing she had never seen.

But following the suggestion that her evidence should be taken with "a pinch of salt", Ms Adams said such an inference was "grossly unfair".

In written evidence published ahead of the hearing, Mr Thompson accused BBC Trust boss Lord Patten and trustee Anthony Fry of "fundamentally misleading" the committee at a previous meeting when they told MPs that members of the Trust were not always included in decision-making.

Mr Thompson said he stood by his claim, adding: "I don't understand why those misleading comments were made. I don't want to impute intention to it but I believe there were damaging and unfair, misleading statements made specifically on this point."

Lord Patten hit back that he took the charge of misleading the committee "very strongly" and said his induction to the job included no references to severance pay.

He said: "I'm in the position in which I'm accused of having misled the committee on something I didn't know and couldn't have been expected to know."

Nicholas Kroll, director of the BBC Trust, drew gasps from MPs when he said he was not "closely involved" in the preparation of a note on October 7 2010 explaining the Byford payment.

The executive, who is paid £238,000, conceded the pay-off was "unquestionably a large figure" but a matter for the BBC executive board remuneration committee and not the Trust.

Ms Hodge told him: "There is not one person around the table who can understand why there was no challenge from you."