Director-General of the BBC

The  is the highest-ranking executive at the British Broadcasting Corporation. Their impact on the day-to-day production of Doctor Who was generally quite indirect. They tended to set the tone that the Doctor Who production office then had to follow. However, there were some occasions on which the Director-General had a noticeably more profound impact, such as when Hugh Greene directly hired Sydney Newman, or when Charles Curran apologised to Mary Whitehouse for the content of The Deadly Assassin, then had Philip Hinchcliffe transferred to another programme.

Public support of Doctor Who from the Director-General has traditionally been rare. However, in September 2012, the newly-installed Director-General George Entwistle made a number of conspicuous and positive remarks about Doctor Who, and even told that he had gotten into television because of watching Jon Pertwee's Doctor Who.