[1] During the Second World War, Brownrigg served on the battleship HMS Warspite as Navigating Officer before taking a staff position under Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham in the planning department of the Naval Expeditionary Force, preparing for D-Day.
He served as Director of Plans for the Admiralty, Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief for the Mediterranean and finally, in 1952, being briefly Naval Aide de Camp to the Queen.
[2] With his experience in planning for Operation Overlord, he was considered the ideal choice for implementing the development of a New Town as envisaged by Patrick Abercrombie and Lord Reith in their eponymous reports.
[3] British Electric Traction's Broadcast Relay Services subsidiary and Associated Newspapers formed a joint company, Associated-Rediffusion (A-R), to bid for a commercial television contract.
[2] His "Official Office Memoranda", giving instructions and setting rules for everything down to the frequency of filing and the decoration on the walls,[5] became a legend throughout ITV.
At the same time, he was also actively involved in defining the station's identity, formulating the programme plans, creating an advertising market for television, chairing ITN and negotiating industrial relations with the film and broadcasting unions.
To counter the competition, they decided to relaunch the station as Rediffusion, London and introduce new programming aimed at younger people and a new identity designed to be less "stuffy" and more able to compete with BBC-2.