Neil Reid

Neil Reid sits somewhere near the top of the BBC's org chart, one more grey-suited executive drifting through meetings about meetings. He speaks in the flattened, non-committal corporate murmur that W1A specialises in, offering just enough encouragement or scepticism to keep Ian Fletcher guessing about where he really stands.

David Westhead plays him with a beautifully dry, unbothered calm that makes Neil Reid the show's straight man amid all the branding jargon and panicked pivoting. He never raises his voice or his eyebrows much, and that stillness is the joke: institutional power expressed as pure, weary politeness.