The new top television man at Mediaworks denies he has a hatchet behind his back, but he does have a long history of television network cuts in his background.

Australian Ian Audsley will take on the role of executive director TV after Brent Impey resigned as chief executive of Mediaworks, but is already denying he is just there to cut costs, even with a short 12-month contract.

Speculation over the future of programmes such as TV3’s Sunrise has been rife since Mr Impey revealed he would be leaving at the end of the year.

Mediaworks was happy to point out Mr Audsley’s 20-year history in Australian television but unsurprisingly made little reference to his reputation as a hatchet man for Nine executive Sam Chisholm.

Soon after he was appointed chief operating officer at Australia’s Nine Network in 2005, Mr Audsley was forced to defend the channel’s decision not to broadcast Aussie entertainment legend Graham Kennedy’s funeral after the network decided it was too expensive.

He followed that with a series of middle management sackings, disposing of head of entertainment Glenn Pallister, marketing chief Jodie Leonard and daytime television director Steve Wood, who worked at Nine for 22 years.

A year later he oversaw the creation of a new head technology job after two senior technology chiefs walked out on the television broadcaster.

He left Nine in 2008 to take a position at Sydney-based advisory and investment firm Lexicon partners, before moving into the Mediaworks role.

Mr Audsley says not to bother with the results Google churns up, although he might not mind being named one of Australia’s most qualified martial artists in some results.

But no wonder – throw his name into the search engine and it only takes two pages to find results like “I'd be s**tting myself too if I saw Ian Audsley wandering through my workplace.”