>When Matt Brittin arrived at the BBC’s Broadcasting House on his first day as its new director-general, it was to a picket of protesting journalists, a phalanx of waiting photographers and a job widely seen as one of the most precarious in British public life.
>Six days on, we meet for lunch and so far so good. The sun is shining hotly on Broadcasting House, keeping even protesters away from its shimmering piazza.
>Caravan, a nearby chain restaurant, is chosen as much for convenience as for its range of fusion dishes that nonetheless are ideal for the late May heatwave. Although perhaps — I reflect as I take in a menu of labneh, tofu and coffees roasted “in north London” — a little on the nose, given a not entirely unfair view of the BBC as a last refuge of an avocado elite.
>But the site also has happy echoes of BBC past, having been the home of Radio 1 until late 2012. Then the national broadcaster was coming off a post-London Olympics high; now it is fighting for relevance as audiences shift to tech platforms where algorithmically honed engagement is valued over BBC notions of impartiality and societal good.
>As an outsider, coming from the tech world, Brittin has brought a similarly strong sense of widescreen ambition, setting himself a nearly impossible task of helping to reinvent public service broadcasting for the 21st century in a job from which few of his predecessors have emerged unscathed.
>“I wouldn’t have done the job 10 years ago when I had a young family,” he admits, reflecting on the time that Tim Davie had to leave through a neighbour’s garden to escape journalists at the front door.
>“But I just think it’s worth fighting for. What I want to try to do is paint a picture of what the BBC can be in the future; relevant, inspiring, distinctive, for the government and for the audience and for the staff to believe that we can yet again reinvent this institution for the moment that we’re in.”
>He has landed at a particularly difficult time. To get to the sunlit uplands of being inspiring and distinctive will require a long slog of cost-cutting and unpopular choices. Weeks after Brittin’s appointment, his predecessor announced plans to [slash 2,000 jobs](https://www.ft.com/content/735f7a8f-4bd7-4af0-b0e7-939964394490?syn-25a6b1a6=1) — about a tenth of its workforce. Brittin has been handed the job of carrying out those cuts — which will mean programming as well as people — while also negotiating a new charter that will dictate the future of the BBC.
>“There will be quite significant changes in staffing levels,” he says. “People will be unhappy about some of the changes, whether it’s audiences or staff members, that we inevitably have to make. Anything you change, some people in the audience will miss because everything’s got value, and so that will be challenged.”
>**The excellent staff** at Caravan have left us in a quiet window seat. I dangle the prospect of a cold beer. “I’m an athlete,” murmurs Brittin, a former Olympic rower whose blistered fingers reveal that he still competes whenever he can get to the oars.
>Two Cokes are ordered alongside a bottle of much-needed cold water for the table. He picks the healthiest of food options — grains and grilled chicken — but admits to being partial to burrata. We order one to share — adding the jalapeño cornbread as a partner — and I go for roasted cod with a herby radish salad.
>Brittin has many traits that explain why he has been picked as the new director-general but the easy affability of the 6ft 3 oarsman is perhaps under-appreciated.
>As the European boss of Google for 18 years, he got to hand out tech millions as part of schemes to support British journalism, even if some complained it was their ad revenue in the first place. But he is a rare director-general who has not worked at the BBC before — the last was Greg Dyke in 2000. With that comes advantages, he thinks, in being clear about the challenges with “an outsider’s eyes”. However, even with plans for a new deputy (to cover “where I don’t have that deep experience”), the buck stops at the top when things go wrong, and his lack of editorial experience makes him more of a target.
>It’s also striking that — unlike most of his predecessors — the BBC job was never the plan. The 57-year-old had been on a mid-life gap year after quitting Google. He’d never taken a break before, having gone from a scholarship-funded private school to Cambridge (he was the first of his family to go to university), with the bits in between filled with hours spent on the river with the British rowing team.
>His year travelling and messing around in his single sculling boat was interrupted by the BBC board’s approach to apply for the job. He did not need a high salary after well-paid years at Google, but wanted something with public value. Google had been “very intense”, he admits, running a $100bn regional business through a period of technological upheaval, Covid and the Ukraine war.
>Even so, he was warned that the BBC would not be easy. Brittin consulted previous directors-general and several heads of news; all had left after tenures overshadowed by editorial scandal, from the shelved *Newsnight* exposé of the paedophile Jimmy Savile to the recent [Trump lawsuit](https://www.ft.com/content/e2f19150-5f64-4ba8-9d62-4a7c3ee49e73?syn-25a6b1a6=1) sparked by an edit of a Panorama documentary. Even now, Brittin is unable to talk about Trump’s legal action other than to say that the BBC is defending itself robustly.
>“The most polite words about the job were that it’s a real handful,” he says. I press him for the least. “Most were unprintable.”
>The BBC is often at the centre of the culture wars that have divided the UK; a punchbag for politicians and, at times, a truculent staff pulling in different directions. [Fran Unsworth](https://www.ft.com/content/cc292411-8bfc-46a5-bbca-06c466536f1a?syn-25a6b1a6=1), a former BBC News boss, recently claimed she was driven out by “bullying” over “progressive editorial issues” such as the rights of transgender people.
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>When Matt Brittin arrived at the BBC’s Broadcasting House on his first day as its new director-general, it was to a picket of protesting journalists, a phalanx of waiting photographers and a job widely seen as one of the most precarious in British public life.
>Six days on, we meet for lunch and so far so good. The sun is shining hotly on Broadcasting House, keeping even protesters away from its shimmering piazza.
>Caravan, a nearby chain restaurant, is chosen as much for convenience as for its range of fusion dishes that nonetheless are ideal for the late May heatwave. Although perhaps — I reflect as I take in a menu of labneh, tofu and coffees roasted “in north London” — a little on the nose, given a not entirely unfair view of the BBC as a last refuge of an avocado elite.
>But the site also has happy echoes of BBC past, having been the home of Radio 1 until late 2012. Then the national broadcaster was coming off a post-London Olympics high; now it is fighting for relevance as audiences shift to tech platforms where algorithmically honed engagement is valued over BBC notions of impartiality and societal good.
>As an outsider, coming from the tech world, Brittin has brought a similarly strong sense of widescreen ambition, setting himself a nearly impossible task of helping to reinvent public service broadcasting for the 21st century in a job from which few of his predecessors have emerged unscathed.
>“I wouldn’t have done the job 10 years ago when I had a young family,” he admits, reflecting on the time that Tim Davie had to leave through a neighbour’s garden to escape journalists at the front door.
>“But I just think it’s worth fighting for. What I want to try to do is paint a picture of what the BBC can be in the future; relevant, inspiring, distinctive, for the government and for the audience and for the staff to believe that we can yet again reinvent this institution for the moment that we’re in.”
>He has landed at a particularly difficult time. To get to the sunlit uplands of being inspiring and distinctive will require a long slog of cost-cutting and unpopular choices. Weeks after Brittin’s appointment, his predecessor announced plans to [slash 2,000 jobs](https://www.ft.com/content/735f7a8f-4bd7-4af0-b0e7-939964394490?syn-25a6b1a6=1) — about a tenth of its workforce. Brittin has been handed the job of carrying out those cuts — which will mean programming as well as people — while also negotiating a new charter that will dictate the future of the BBC.
>“There will be quite significant changes in staffing levels,” he says. “People will be unhappy about some of the changes, whether it’s audiences or staff members, that we inevitably have to make. Anything you change, some people in the audience will miss because everything’s got value, and so that will be challenged.”
>**The excellent staff** at Caravan have left us in a quiet window seat. I dangle the prospect of a cold beer. “I’m an athlete,” murmurs Brittin, a former Olympic rower whose blistered fingers reveal that he still competes whenever he can get to the oars.
>Two Cokes are ordered alongside a bottle of much-needed cold water for the table. He picks the healthiest of food options — grains and grilled chicken — but admits to being partial to burrata. We order one to share — adding the jalapeño cornbread as a partner — and I go for roasted cod with a herby radish salad.
>Brittin has many traits that explain why he has been picked as the new director-general but the easy affability of the 6ft 3 oarsman is perhaps under-appreciated.
>As the European boss of Google for 18 years, he got to hand out tech millions as part of schemes to support British journalism, even if some complained it was their ad revenue in the first place. But he is a rare director-general who has not worked at the BBC before — the last was Greg Dyke in 2000. With that comes advantages, he thinks, in being clear about the challenges with “an outsider’s eyes”. However, even with plans for a new deputy (to cover “where I don’t have that deep experience”), the buck stops at the top when things go wrong, and his lack of editorial experience makes him more of a target.
>It’s also striking that — unlike most of his predecessors — the BBC job was never the plan. The 57-year-old had been on a mid-life gap year after quitting Google. He’d never taken a break before, having gone from a scholarship-funded private school to Cambridge (he was the first of his family to go to university), with the bits in between filled with hours spent on the river with the British rowing team.
>His year travelling and messing around in his single sculling boat was interrupted by the BBC board’s approach to apply for the job. He did not need a high salary after well-paid years at Google, but wanted something with public value. Google had been “very intense”, he admits, running a $100bn regional business through a period of technological upheaval, Covid and the Ukraine war.
>Even so, he was warned that the BBC would not be easy. Brittin consulted previous directors-general and several heads of news; all had left after tenures overshadowed by editorial scandal, from the shelved *Newsnight* exposé of the paedophile Jimmy Savile to the recent [Trump lawsuit](https://www.ft.com/content/e2f19150-5f64-4ba8-9d62-4a7c3ee49e73?syn-25a6b1a6=1) sparked by an edit of a Panorama documentary. Even now, Brittin is unable to talk about Trump’s legal action other than to say that the BBC is defending itself robustly.
>“The most polite words about the job were that it’s a real handful,” he says. I press him for the least. “Most were unprintable.”
>The BBC is often at the centre of the culture wars that have divided the UK; a punchbag for politicians and, at times, a truculent staff pulling in different directions. [Fran Unsworth](https://www.ft.com/content/cc292411-8bfc-46a5-bbca-06c466536f1a?syn-25a6b1a6=1), a former BBC News boss, recently claimed she was driven out by “bullying” over “progressive editorial issues” such as the rights of transgender people.
PBS CEO John Amerika