Jana Bennett, the departing BBC Vision director, became synonymous with the phrase "first female director general". Unfortunately for her she also became associated with a less flattering phrase – "Crowngate".
The height of Bennett's influence and power came just over four years ago, in November 2006, when she was put in charge of the newly created BBC Vision. The BBC said it was the largest multimedia, commissioning and broadcast group of its kind in the world, with a total budget last estimated at £1.7bn.
Bennett described her job overseeing six BBC TV channels as well as its in-house programme-making departments as like the "conductor of the orchestra, looking across the piece".
Her exit, with the BBC under pressure to cut executive costs, may coincide with the dismantling of the Vision empire, echoing the demise of another shortlived corporation invention, the all-powerful "head of fiction" role, which came to an end when its former incumbent Jane Tranter left for the US at the end of 2008. Like Tranter, Bennett is expected to take a role within BBC Worldwide.
Born in New Hampshire in the US but educated mainly in the UK – and a friend of Tony Blair at Oxford – Bennett was being touted as a future director general of the BBC ever since 2002, when she was chosen to replace the then Channel 4-bound Mark Thompson as the corporation's director of television. She was one of "Dyke's darlings", along with the then BBC1 controller Lorraine Heggessey and Jane Root, then in charge of BBC2.
But she went from hot favourite to outside bet in the DG stakes in the wake of "Crowngate", the infamous press launch trailer that misleadingly edited to show the Queen apparently storming out of a photoshoot.
The then BBC1 controller, Peter Fincham, took the rap and departed the corporation in October 2007. But Bennett remained in her post even though she was criticised for her "lack of curiosity" in an independent report into the controversy. It was a reminder that lack of curiosity didn't kill the cat.
The Crowngate controversy was one of a string of fakery scandals that appeared to consume not just the BBC – on programmes such as Blue Peter and Comic Relief – but the entire broadcasting industry. Bennett described 2007 as a "year of going through gauntlets ... not just me individually but the whole industry".
That Bennett did't follow Fincham out of the door was said to be evidence of her powers of self-preservation and her knowledge of the BBC's corridors of power. And she retained the support of the director general, with whom it has been said she has a spiky but respectful relationship.
"Mark and I don't fall out," Bennett once said. "We just have very straightforward conversations."
As the first female head of BBC Science, in the 1990s Bennett built up a track record of intelligent and popular programming, including Walking with Dinosaurs and The Human Body, and was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 2000 for services to science broadcasting.
She joined the BBC as a news trainee in 1978 and has spent her entire career with the corporation apart from two and a half years in the US as executive vice-president and general manager of Discovery Communications, from where she returned eight years ago to become Dyke's de facto number two.
This was the age, remember, before the post of deputy director general – another BBC job which has come to the end of its natural life.
As director of BBC Vision Bennett was both one of Thompson's key lieutenants and one of the corporation's main defender-in-chief, at the centre of controversies over Strictly Come Dancing and top talent pay. It was Bennett who decided to withdraw the BBC's offer of a contract to Christine Bleakley after she publicly dithered over joining ITV.
Bennett's early BBC career included stints on Newsnight, the Money Programme and Nationwide, before going on to produce Panorama and editing Horizon. She is married to Richard Clemmow, the former head of BBC TV news who is now an independent producer.
But how to describe her? Unpretentious, mild-mannered, and bold are the sort of adjectives most readily attached to her. The Daily Express once labelled her a "BBC bully girl [who] despite her quiet exterior is regarded by colleagues as tough and uncompromising". Well, she had just been responsible for the exit from the Beeb of its columnist, Robert Kilroy-Silk.
A keen amateur singer, she also showed she was game for a laugh with her appearance at an industry version of ITV's Britain's Got Talent at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival a couple of years back. Possibly laughs were not what she had in mind when she agreed to take part.
As for her leaving present, her BBC colleagues might like to find out if she needs a new handbag. Bennett once claimed £500 on her BBC expenses after her handbag was stolen at a business function, and also spent £1,168 – invariably for BBC talent – over an eight-month period.
Now the flowers will be going the other way. And not on expenses.
