Lord Birt made many enemies in his long tenure at the top of the BBC, as he fought to reform the organisation in the late 1980s and 1990s. Now he seems to be taking a similarly unsentimental approach to EMI. The veteran television executive has been advising Terra Firma, the stricken British music major's private equity owner, on how to rescue it. Lord Birt's highly critical annual report, unusual for any company, is a deliberate attempt to distance EMI from its troubled past but is typical of a man who was unpopular with creatives when he ran the BBC and was denounced by Dennis Potter, the playwright, as a “croak-voiced Dalek”.

After graduating from Cambridge University, John Birt began his career as a television producer at ITV's Granada and LWT. His only real brush with the music industry came in 1967, when, aged 22, he persuaded Mick Jagger to be interviewed in the immediate aftermath of a successful appeal against a conviction for possession of amphetamines. The interview appeared that night on World in Action, creating splash headlines for what was only Birt's second television programme.

However, it failed to engender any long-term loyalty from the Rolling Stone. This year Jagger walked out on EMI, ending an association that dated back to the 1970s. The defection became a symbol of the difficulties that Lord Birt and the Terra Firma team were having in persuading artists and producers to stay with them.

John Birt stayed in current affairs, on World in Action, and latterly The Frost Programme. His associated with David Frost, its host, led him in 1977 to produce the legendary Frost/Nixon interviews, now the subject of a stage play and film. As a producer he agitated for the creation of a fourth channel, and was interviewed, unsuccessfully, for the post of Channel 4's chief executive, before moving into management at LWT.

He was drafted in to the BBC, initially as deputy director-general in 1987, in the aftermath of the dismissal of Alasdair Milne, and took over the corporation in 1993, introducing a string of financial and structural reforms that prompted Potter's public criticism.

A Labour ally, after leaving the BBC he spent four years as an unpaid “blue skies” adviser to Tony Blair, before finally returning to the private sector in 2005, advising Guy Hands, Terra Firma's chief executive, across its portfolio. Until Mr Hands bought EMI last year, Lord Birt did not have the chance to return to the media business.