Sir Hugh Carleton Greene KCMG OBE (15 November 1910 – 19 February 1987) was a British television executive and journalist.

After working for newspapers in the 1930s, Greene spent most of his later career with the BBC, rising through the managerial ranks of overseas broadcasting and then news for the main domestic channels.

Greene was educated at Berkhamsted School and at Merton College, Oxford, where he obtained a second class in classical moderations (1931) and English (1933).

[5] The writer of his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, Colin Shaw, comments that Greene's direct witnessing of the Nazis deeply influenced him for the rest of his life, "teaching him to hate intolerance and the degradation of character to which the loss of freedom led".

As the war spread in Europe he reported from Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, the Netherlands, Belgium and finally France, returning to Britain in June 1940, narrowly escaping the German army's arrival in Paris.

[7] After a few months in the Royal Air Force as a pilot officer in intelligence, he was released to join the BBC German Service, becoming its news editor.

[8] At the end of the war the British government asked Greene to return to Germany as controller of broadcasting in the British-occupied zone.

[10][11] Greene was appointed to succeed him; Shaw comments that this temporarily distanced him from any direct involvement with programmes, but clearly identified him as the potential successor to Jacob, who was due to retire in 1959.

In this role Greene encountered resistance to modernisation by key figures in the BBC news division, headed by Tahu Hole.

The commercial Independent Television News (ITN), launched in 1955 was strongly outperforming the BBC in innovation, flair and audience numbers.

In that capacity, Shaw writes, he remained "a working journalist capable, when the need arose, of dealing expeditiously with those editorial issues that were referred to him".

[13] Soon after Greene's appointment, the government set up a committee of inquiry into broadcasting, chaired by the industrialist Sir Harry Pilkington.

[7] In a short history of the corporation, the BBC says of Greene's tenure, "he encouraged programme-makers to reflect the social changes and attitudes of the Sixties": After the arrival of That Was The Week That Was in 1962 ... the British Establishment would never be seen in the same light.

... Viewers enjoyed the portrayal of a new breed of gritty policemen in Z-Cars (1962), wept at the plight of the homeless in The Wednesday Play, Cathy Come Home (1966) and were riveted by Doctor Who (1963), Top of the Pops (1964), Horizon (1964), Tomorrow's World (1965) and Dr Kildare, all attracting large audiences.

We don’t really care if they complain.Although under Greene's leadership the BBC caught up with and overtook commercial television in popularity among the British public as a whole,[1] there were dissenting voices.

Harold Wilson, who became prime minister in 1964, was less tolerant than his predecessors of the BBC's satire and lack of deference,[16] and Mary Whitehouse, a campaigner who described herself as "an evangelical Christian and moral crusader", accused Greene of being "the devil incarnate" for allowing the broadcast of dramas with sexual content or bad language.