You might know Robert Llewellyn as, occasionally, Kryten of Red Dwarf, though these days he is also working on bigger and better things in the form of Carpool, his chat show-meets-green-car-review web video show. But both these projects pale into insignificance when you see his 2006 video on Dad dancing, which has to be one of the finest examples of the phenomenon ever recorded.

The BBC evidently thought so too, because they copied a section of it and used it in a report on North West Tonight without asking or even telling him about it. A bit cheeky, really.

We asked the BBC if they had a deal with Google that allowed them to use content from YouTube without attribution, but they said that isn't the case. What the BBC does do is use short sections of material form the web under 'fair use'.

The BBC claimed it hadn't been contacted by Llewelyn, but has apologised.

"We have yet to receive a complaint from Robert Llewellyn but we are sorry we did not let him know that we were using his 'dad dancing' clip ahead of broadcast," said a spokesperson for North West Tonight.

"While we don't have an agreement with Google entitling us to use YouTube videos, we do sometimes use short extracts from material on the internet to illustrate current stories, which is allowed under the copyright exception of 'fair dealing'. We used a short clip of Robert to illustrate the Lowry Centre's search for the city's worst dad dancing.

"While we did credit his website in the clip we should, in retrospect, have spoken to him before using it so would like to apologise to him for that omission."

Llewellyn insists he has written to the BBC, and also published the letter on his website, in which he says it should be assumed that it is "appropriate to at least inform the creator".

Given the knickers that get twisted when the public re-appropriate professional content without permission, it seems rather inapproriate for the BBC to be doing the same. If someone has posted pictures to Flickr and specifically opted to label them as available for commercial use, that seems a bit different. But casual copying of content should not be regarded as acceptable, and it seems a bit off that it took someone with a profile to flag up that this is common practice.