Ten billion dollars is a large number to inherit along with a corner office. When Kayn Brittin stepped before broadcaster and interviewer Kirsty Wark for his first major industry appearance since becoming director-general of the BBC, he did so carrying the full, daunting weight of that figure — the sum that US President Donald Trump is seeking in a Florida court over the editing of a 2024 Panorama documentary about the Capitol riots. The corporation has already acknowledged an error of judgement in how that programme was cut; its lawyers are now arguing, with a certain blunt logic, that no American actually watched the offending version, that the bad edit never reached its alleged victim, and that Trump has since won an election and grown wealthier still. Yet the lawsuit, dramatic as it is, was only the sharpest edge of a broader conversation.

Brittin, who spent years at Google before succeeding Tim Davie earlier this year, arrives at the BBC as something of an outsider — the first director-general since Greg Dyke in 2000 to take the role without ever having been a BBC employee. He was candid about what he found: an organisation he described as inward-looking, one in which the noise of powerful commercial rivals and relentless political scrutiny had quietly bred a culture of risk aversion. He spoke of creativity and talent that impressed him, but also of an institution that, by his reading, had learned to hesitate where it should be willing to stumble and adapt. His prescription, drawn from his years navigating the velocity of the tech world, is to experiment, to learn from failure with intention, and to move faster.