Richard Madeley has put the incoming Director General, Matt Brittin, at the centre of a warning about the broadcaster’s future after the pair appeared together on Radio 4’s The Media show. Madeley said Brittin answered tough questions with unusual directness and confidence, then drew his own bleak conclusion about the job waiting for him.

The point that stuck was Brittin’s story about the chickens at home. He said his wife keeps them in their little garden, that he once asked how long chickens live, and that he was told: until the foxes get them. In Madeley’s telling, that became a blunt metaphor for the itself: a big role, a lot of danger, and not much comfort for the person taking it on.

That matters now because Brittin is stepping into one of the most exposed jobs in British broadcasting at a moment when the corporation’s troubles are already part of the conversation around him. Madeley said those problems had not happened on Brittin’s watch, which gives the former Google boss a cleaner start than some of his predecessors enjoyed. But it also leaves him with the same test that has undone others: how to lead an institution that seems to attract attacks from every direction.

Madeley’s account did not read like a polite profile piece. He said Brittin was refreshingly straight in answering questions about the ’s troubles, yet the very way the discussion unfolded underlined how hard the post can be. The job is often described as impossible for a reason. Many who have held it have not lasted long, and that history hangs over any new appointment more heavily than any set of talking points.

There was also a detour that showed how quickly serious broadcasting talk can slide into stranger territory. Madeley referred to Steven Hawking’s view that if humans had really been visited by aliens, the outcome would probably have been pretty unpleasant, and to religious claims in the US that supposed aliens are really demons sent by Satan. The digression had nothing to do with management, but it did show how the conversation drifted beyond the corporation and into the kind of offbeat territory that television and radio personalities sometimes cannot resist.

For Brittin, the next test is not whether he can explain the ’s problems in public. He already did that well enough to win praise from one of his own interviewers. The harder question is whether he can outlast the pattern that has swallowed so many others before him, or whether the foxes will turn up at New Broadcasting House too.