Bob Wigley, the prominent City financier, emerged last night as a leading candidate in the saga to find a successor to Michael Grade as chairman of ITV. If successful, the former head of Merrill Lynch in Europe, who has advised on countless bids and takeovers, would become the second banker to snap up one of broadcasting’s top jobs in a fortnight.

Lord Burns, the chairman of Abbey and a former Treasury mandarin, is expected to be named chairman of Channel 4 this week, taking over from Luke Johnson in a job that paid the outgoing entrepreneur £73,000.

Although Channel 4’s search will have taken slightly more than two months — with relatively few leaks along the way — ITV has spent more than six months trying to find new leadership in a process that has been played out embarrassingly in public.

ITV first tried to recruit a new chief executive, but that process collapsed after talks with Tony Ball failed acrimoniously, and latterly tried to find a chairman, only to see Sir Crispin Davis and Sir Michael Bishop, its two leading candidates, turn down the job down in the belief that the assignment was too difficult.

The X Factor broadcaster is understood to be talking to a small group of candidates for the £250,000- a-year job, with no clear front-runner. No decision is expected for at least a fortnight in a process that is being handled for ITV by Sir James Crosby, its senior independent director, who is a former banker and ex-chief executive of HBOS.

Neither Mr Wigley nor Lord Burns has run or worked for a broadcaster, but each would have the task of finding a new chief executive for his respective organisation while commercial broadcasting is grappling with the most severe downturn in the history of commercial television.

However, Mr Wigley advised Sir Philip Green, the billionaire retailer, on his abortive bid for Marks & Spencer, and Sir Philip now divides his time between running his Topshop empire and acting as agent to Simon Cowell, the X Factor judge and impresario, who is ITV’s most important on-screen star.

Mr Wigley, 48, was at Merrill Lynch from 1996, advising on deals such as RBS’s ill-fated takeover of ABN Amro, the Dutch bank, until departing last year after Merrill’s takeover by Bank of America. Since then he has taken up the chairmanship of Yell, the Yellow Pages publisher, which this week won agreement from its banks to relax the terms attached to its £4 billion debt pile, and is actively seeking a job.

Lord Burns, meanwhile, advised Tessa Jowell, the former Culture Secretary, on the future of the BBC licence fee and in 2005 concluded that the television levy would become “increasingly difficult to sustain ... in the long term”. However, his suggestion that the BBC should move to voluntary subscription and perhaps take advertising was ignored by ministers.

Lord Burns is nicknamed “Teflon Terry” for his ability to glide from one difficult job to another. His tenure as Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, from 1991 to 1998, included the national humiliation of Britain’s enforced departure from the exchange-rate mechanism. While he was at Abbey, he hired Luqman Arnold as chief executive, but the two failed to turn around the former building society, and it was sold to Banco Santander.

Lord Burns spent two years as chairman of Marks & Spencer, joining a year after Sir Philip’s failed bid, but his recruitment skills were tarnished on that occasion by a failure to find a successor to Sir Stuart Rose and a dispute over his payoff on departure from the retailer.

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