Gregory Dyke (born 20 May 1947) is a British media executive, football administrator, journalist and broadcaster. Since the 1960s, Dyke has had a long career in the UK in print and then broadcast journalism. He is credited with introducing "tabloid" television to British broadcasting, and reviving the ratings of TV-am. In the 1990s, he held chief executive positions at LWT Group, Pearson Television, and Channel 5.
Dyke was director-general of the BBC from January 2000 to January 2004; he resigned following heavy criticism of the BBC's news reporting process in the Hutton Inquiry. He was also a director of Manchester United and chairman of Brentford football clubs, and from 2013 to 2016 was chairman of the Football Association. He was chancellor of the University of York from 2004 to 2015 and chairman of the British Film Institute between 2008 and 2016. He is currently the chairman of children's television company HiT Entertainment, and is a panellist on Sky News's The Pledge.
Since 2016, Dyke has been vice president for television of BAFTA. In 2018, he became chairman of London Film School.
Greg Dyke was born in 1947, in Hayes, Middlesex, the youngest of three sons in a "stable, lower middle class" family. His father was an insurance salesman. The family lived at 17 Cerne Close until Dyke was nine years old, then moved to Cedars Drive, Hillingdon. He was educated at Yeading Primary School and then Hayes Grammar School, which he left with one grade "E" at A-level mathematics. After school, he was briefly a trainee manager at Marks & Spencer, before leaving to work as a trainee reporter for the Hillingdon Mirror, becoming chief reporter in eight months. He left the Mirror after attempting to stage a union-backed protest against poor pay conditions by the junior staff on the paper. He then got a job at the Slough Evening Mail. Among his colleagues was future music journalist Colin Irwin.
Dyke then went on to study for a degree at the University of York as a mature student, graduating in 1974 with a bachelor's degree in politics. During his time at York, Dyke was active in student politics, and was part of a collective that produced a psychedelic underground student magazine called Nouse. He also met and married his first wife, Christine Taylor, whilst at the university. His contemporaries and friends at York included future journalists Linda Grant and Peter Hitchens, the latter then active in the International Socialists. Dyke was awarded an honorary doctorate from the university in 1999 and was chancellor from 2004 to 2015.
Break into television: LWT and TV-AM
After university, Dyke followed his first wife to Newcastle. He had become disillusioned with newspaper journalism, and tried for a job as a junior reporter at BBC Radio Teesside. He was unsuccessful, apparently because the interviewers felt no-one would understand his accent. Dyke instead found work covering rural affairs for the Newcastle Journal. He moved back to London with Christine in 1974 to become campaign officer for the Wandsworth Community Relations Council. He hated the job and left to campaign to be elected GLC Councillor for Putney. Again he was unsuccessful.
Dyke was given assistance getting a job at London Weekend Television (LWT) by fellow ex-Newcastle journalist Nicholas Evans, who was at the time working on Weekend World. Dyke got a junior position on LWT's local politics programme, in the current affairs department. His bosses there were John Birt and Peter Jay. He attracted attention for trying to give the programmes he worked on a more populist edge. This led to him being given the chance to launch a new early evening current affairs topical news programme. This became The Six O'Clock Show, fronted by Michael Aspel, with co-hosts Danny Baker and Janet Street-Porter. The show is seen by many as the first example of British tabloid TV.
After the success of The Six O' Clock Show, Dyke was brought in by Jonathan Aitken to become programme director at ailing station TV-am in April 1983. The station was doing very badly in the ratings compared to the BBC's popular Breakfast Time magazine style programme. He was instrumental in reviving the breakfast show's fortunes by introducing a new schedule based around popular features including bingo, celebrity gossip and horoscopes.
Dyke left TV-am, in May 1984 after Bruce Gyngell was brought in to enhance and improve the company to allow it to be financially viable. Ten days later, Michael Moor, the TV-am general manager, also left the station. In August 1984, Dyke became director of programmes at Television South (TVS).
In April 1987, Dyke moved from TVS to LWT again to be director of programmes, replacing John Birt, having originally worked at LWT in 1978. At the same time, he helped LWT re-sectioning the company in a bid to cut costs and overhaul the working practices within the company ahead of a new franchise period, which it won. Dyke was responsible for cancelling ITV's coverage of professional wrestling in 1988. In 1992 he was appointed the chairman of the ITV Council, and LWT chief executive. In February 1993 he was appointed chairman of the GMTV board and tasked with overhauling the station format, which included "more popular journalism". His role was primarily to bring new and imaginative ideas to the station without taking on full day-to-day running. In 1994, he made a fortune when Granada bought out LWT.
Dyke became chairman and chief executive of Pearson Television in January 1995, and began expanding the company. His first acquisition was Grundy Television which helped build Pearson into the biggest non-US independent production company in the world.
At the end of October 1995 a consortium guided by Dyke was awarded the licence for Channel 5, and he became the first chairman of the new channel. He was appointed chairman of Channel 5 on 21 February 1997. Also in 1997 he was asked to review the Patients' Charter of the National Health Service.
In 2000, Dyke took over from John Birt as director-general of the BBC. He was appointed despite Conservative protests that he had donated £50,000 to the Labour Party and was a 'crony'. At the beginning of his tenure, he famously promised to "cut the crap" at the corporation. The "crap" he referred to was the complex internal market Birt had introduced at the BBC which, it was argued, turned employees away from making programmes and into managers. Dyke reversed this trend – he reduced administration costs from 24% of total income to 15%. Unusually for a recent director-general, he had a good rapport with his employees and was popular with the majority of BBC staff, his management style being seen as more open and risk-taking than Birt's.
Jonathan Gifford, who worked for BBC Magazines in BBC Worldwide during the management of Birt and Dyke, observed "Dyke came across well. He was direct, sensible and approachable. His vision for the BBC was inspirational." Martin Montague, a producer on digital radio station BBC7 said "I know that people in local radio think he walks on water because of all that he's put into that."
Apart from restoring staff morale, Dyke laid claim to two major achievements during his office. In 2002, he introduced the Freeview terrestrial digital transmission platform with six additional BBC channels, and persuaded Sky TV to join the consortium. Previously this was an ITV subscription service that had closed with major losses, but by mid-2007 it could be seen by more than half the population. After leaving the BBC, he said that he always realised that the introduction of Freeview helped to prevent a subscription funding model for the BBC gain traction, because it is impossible for broadcasters to switch off the signal to individual Freeview boxes.
Dyke controversially described the corporation in early 2001 as "hideously white", based on statistics that showed the organisation's management structure was 98% white. Dyke said that "The figures we have at the moment suggest that quite a lot of people from different ethnic backgrounds that we do attract to the BBC leave. Maybe they don't feel at home, maybe they don't feel welcome." Dyke set a target that by 2003, 10% of the BBC's UK workforce and 4% of management would be from ethnic minority backgrounds. In September 2004, Dyke received an award for his remarks from Glasgow-based organisation Empower Scotland, which fights against workplace racism.