Former Saatchi adman Adam Crozier was described as being overjoyed by the prospect of taking on the job as Head of ITV. He has a lot to be overjoyed about.

One of the truly terrifying things about seeing public figures waltz from one overpaid and underachieved task to another is that, from time to time, you’ve met them. I’ve met Adam Crozier. I spent three hours with the bloke, and he seemed to me both charming and funny. Charlie and Maurice Saatchi (when they decided they’d had enough of their original agency) moved down the road, and ensured that within five years they were bigger than the alma mater. They did not take Adam Crozier with them on that voyage. And one has to observe that his track-record since then has justified their decision.

Yet somehow, Adam has blagged himself a £620,000 ‘golden hello’ from his new employer ITV. If I was an ITV shareholder (and I thank the Lord I’m not) I would be taking my kit off at the next AGM in protest about this. Not only should every employer have realised by now that rewarding somebody before they even turn up is nothing short of giving an unsecured gift to somebody you just met; the plain truth is, Crozier has a great deal to prove.

The first thing he needs to demonstrate is that he isn’t a dork. His first job post Saatchi was running the FA. Adam Crozier is the man who chose Sven Goran Eriksson to be England’s soccer manager. As he’s Scottish, this was an excellent choice by Crozier, because Eriksson produced an anodyne Sassenach side accompanied by Wags nonsense and dismal results. Sven also shagged Ulrika Johnssonn in addition to his contractual obligations, but this had no discernible effect on team performance. When Eriksson departed, Crozier was not far behind his protege: unwilling to wait for the new Wembley budget to spiral out of control, Adam was on his way to Royal Mail.

Achievements in this next challenge included alienating most of the workforce, and not so much taking as removing the pulse at the centre of thousands of rural villages. Thatcherite down to his hand-made boots, Adam greatly preferred massive bonuses for him to viable communities for them. He also used his advertising experience to persuade mail users that fewer deliveries represented a streamlined service. As the Royal Mail fiddled its delivery tests and floundered into a series of acrimonious disputes, Crozier steeled himself for the crisis by resigning in order to take the ITV job.

What does Adam Crozier bring to the ITV party that might justify a £620,000 signing-on fee? It’s not easy to tell, but we mustn’t forget that he comes from an ad agency background, and therefore presumably knows his onions.

But which onions does he know? I would’ve thought that the major challenge for ITV from here on is to improve the content quality and get up to speed with all the online developments it seems to be worryingly hazy about. Needless to say, since Adam Crozier was last an advertising suit, the business has been subject to a radical shake-out; and even in his heyday, the man who brought us Swedish boredom and one postal collection a day was not on the creative side of the advertising business.

He will be joined in his task by new Chairman Archie Norman, a former retail client at Asda whose sole contribution to engaging TV ads was the sight of customers smacking their bums in appreciation of low prices. An extraordinarily rude and authoritarian man, Norman is unlikely to give the viewing public anything beyond what they claim to want in focus groups. We should therefore expect his regime to be one wherein low-brow is the height of aspiration. What Crozier might add to that formula is anyone’s guess; but having reduced two great British institutions to a laughing stock, it may well be that he’s going for three in a row.