Does John Birt, former Director General of the BBC, deserve the derision he has received from the press in his role as advisor to Tony Blair on ending Britain's public transport fiasco? Nicholas Fraser has personal experience of the man.

The first time I met John Birt was in the 1970s, when he was interviewing candidates for the post of researcher on London Weekend Television's Weekend World. With the assistance of Peter Jay, who was later to become economics editor of the BBC, he had just written a series of pieces for The Times suggesting that television wasn't serious enough. To secure a job on this show, I had been warned, one would have to give ample evidence of high-mindedness. So I was prepared for the Big Question when it came. Was there anything that television couldn't analyze, Birt asked. I knew that I should say no, but when I looked at his locks (a John Lennon, salt-and-pepper cut) and his dandy Carnaby Street suit (Armani had yet to hit the streets), I realized that I would not prosper with Birt. Suicidally, I said that TV was about stories and characters, that in the end it was a popular medium unsuited to too much analysis. For all I know, Peter Mandelson, hired by Birt around this time, was chosen in place of me.

In those days, commercial TV companies were required to demonstrate their seriousness by hiring ambitious Oxbridge graduates. Among them, Birt, with an engineering degree from Oxford, was exceptional in his attraction to power. An early programme he made featured not just Mick Jagger, but also the Archbishop of Canterbury and William Rees Mogg, then editor of The Times. Birt, as television's cultural czar Melvyn Bragg (himself no slouch at networking) once said, responded to the presence of the powerful "like a heat-seeking missile".

In the 1980s, Mrs. Thatcher had become exasperated by what she saw as the wayward, slipshod management of the BBC. Birt was sent for by the new Chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, to clean the place out. After modernizing BBC news (the best and most durable achievement of Birt's career), he edged out his competitors to become Director General. Urged to streamline BBC management, he sacked some of the old guard (not as many as he had hoped) and hired a great number of expensive management consultants.

Under Birt, those who endeared themselves to him were obliged to sit through interminable meetings. He kept himself at a distance from underlings, practising what his erstwhile colleague and rival Michael Grade described as "a Trappist-monk style of management". Meetings for even senior staff required charts and bullet points, and it was rare indeed to find oneself praised. One senior refusenik alluded to Birt's "anal sadistic" meetings. For his part, Birt seemed happier dealing with management documents than people. He often said that he didn't care whether people liked him or not.

But the BBC did survive. Although his successor, Greg Dyke, has scrapped many of the misguided reforms, it remains Birt's creation. While working on the future of transport, Birt is also completing two books: a management primer and a memoir. For our trains and roads, one can imagine him producing a long and radical review, full of sage policy suggestions leading to many options, not many of which will ever be taken up. But Birt will have moved on by then. Some educational institution will require his attention, and one can imagine him dressed in a chocolate-coloured velour headgear, directing the stripping of age-old ivy. Somewhere, the right memo governing the precise colour of the replacement plastic ivy substitute, will have been written and filed away. But will John Birt ever care whether he is loved or not?

Nicholas Fraser is a producer at the BBC.

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