Who is Greg Dyke?

Rodent

Greg Dyke has been appointed as new Chairman of The FA.

Our potted history of Mister Dyke (we read his autobiography a while back) is below:

Beached

Dyke emerged into the public eye at London Weekend Television as a producer working with the likes of Danny Baker and Janet Street Porter but became famous as the saviour of TV-am, where he replaced serious current affairs content with Roland Rat, Chris Tarrant interviewing donkeys on seaside beaches and serious journalists like John Stapleton reading out the newspaper Bingo numbers.

Plod

He then moved onto TVS – the station that launched Bobby Davro – On the Box onto the world in the name of entertainment.

He was soon back at LWT as one of the head-honchos, where one of his decisions was to scrap popular entertainment shows like Jimmy Tarbuck's Live at Her Majesty's and plunge us all into two decades of bloody Heartbeat on Sunday nights. More controversially, he AXED World of Sport, ITV's answer to Grandstand, upsetting all the violent grannies who loved at bit of Wrestling before the football results. Bad news for grapple fans.

Axed

While at LWT, Dyke was effectively running ITV Sport and the embryo of the Premier League can be traced back to his dealings with First Division Chairmen and Chief Execs. Sadly for Greg, this this would blow up in his face when Sky Sports swooped for the telly rights.

When Granada swallowed up LWT as ITV homogenised, Dyke would make millions from his shares.

Dyke would go on to be a popular Director General of the BBC, at which point his Labour supporting past would be brought to the fore. Ironically, his collision course with Labour's Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell over the Kelly affair and the Hutton Inquiry would signal the end of tenure at the corporation.

Do you come from Manchester?

Despite being a southerner, Dyke is a keen Manchester United supporter and used to be a shareholder and director, at one point opposing a planned takeover by BSkyB. He only sold his shares when holding conflicted with his TV interests.

He is currently chairman of Brentford FC, a role he will relinquish before taking up the FA reins in July.