Tony Ball has a new toy. The man who has just taken the helm at British Sky Broadcasting, the pay-TV group, has splashed out nearly £12,000 sterling (€18,200) on a BMW motorbike.

Mr Ball will zoom into work on it from the central London hotel where he is camping out until he finds a house. But when he actually reaches the BSkyB complex at Isleworth, west of London, he is so new to the job - he says - that he's "still trying to find out where the restrooms are".

Mr Ball, the first Englishman to run BSkyB - which is 40 per cent owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation - has been at the company for just five days. He took over from Mark Booth, the American who had been chief executive for 18 months. His appointment comes at an important time for BSkyB. Mr Booth left a few months after the collapse of merger talks between BSkyB and Canal Plus, the French pay - TV company. His departure prompted speculation - denied by BSkyB - that he was angry that Mr Murdoch was considering ceding the top executive position in a merged entity to the French.

Now an agreement could be back on the cards. Vivendi of France last week acquired the pay-TV operations of Pathe - a deal that will bring it a 17 per cent stake in BSkyB to add to its large shareholding in Canal Plus.

Mr Ball says talks between the two payTV groups have not restarted: "If it makes sense for this business, then it's something we'd explore. But there's nothing at the moment."

Whatever his and the company's fate, Mr Ball has another more pressing challenge - to see through the launch of BSkyB's 140-channel digital service. Mr Booth oversaw the birth of digital satellite, but Mr Ball has aggressive plans to speed up its roll-out: "I want to be digital very, very soon, much quicker than in the original plan."

Following the decision to give away the decoders needed to receive digital signals, he admits that demand is in danger of outstripping supply. "I'd like to be able to deliver the stuff quicker than we are at the moment. [But] it's a nice problem to have."

Mr Ball's impatience to get the digital service off the ground is typical: he is a man in a hurry. His mother will tell you, he says, "my stock line at the age of three was always: `why not?' "

The son of a bookmaker, Mr Ball was born in 1955, in Holborn, near enough the sound of Bow Bells to give him a cockney accent. Having done an HND course in engineering, and dabbled with photography, he started as an outside broadcast engineer at Thames Television, the ITV company, in his early twenties. A union official who "went on strike a couple of times", he stayed 11 years before helping found Champion TV, and launching the Britain's first sports channel.

Shortly afterwards, he was initiated into the Murdoch empire, joining Sky Sports for three years in 1993.

Vic Wakeling, now managing director of Sky Sports, was for a short time his boss. But while some colleagues may have been surprised to see Mr Ball rejoin the company six years later as chief executive, Mr Wakeling says he was a "natural" choice.

He points to the impact Mr Ball made in the US after leaving Sky Sports in 1996 and rising to become president and chief executive of Fox/Liberty Networks, the US sports network. He is credited with building up the Fox Sports Net cable network: in three years, it is a serious rival to Disney's ESPN, which has been at the forefront of sports programming for two decades.

His former colleagues at Fox say his broadcast engineering background has been invaluable. Mr David Hill, chairman and chief executive officer of Fox Broadcasting Company, comments: "The problem is 90 per cent of TV executives haven't got a clue what a video machine looks like or what it does. He knows the business from the ground up."

Mr Hill and other executives say Mr Ball is a renowned practical joker. Mr Jeff Shell, chief financial officer of Fox/Liberty Networks, remembers him setting up an elaborate prank to inform one of the company's most frugal executives that he had to cut his budgets by 50 per cent.

But if Mr Ball has a sense of humour, he is in no way inclined to smile on fools. "His management style I'd characterise as extremely tough," says Mr Shell. "He really does not make you feel comfortable. He wants you to feel paranoid, under attack from competitors."

That is something Mr Ball freely admits. "I might sometimes nurture an environment of confusion. I think often you get the best response out of executives when you've got them on the back foot."

His aggressive management tactics are reminiscent of Mr Booth's predecessor, Mr Sam Chisholm, who took him under his wing during his first stint at BSkyB in the early 1990s.

Now that Mr Ball is back, his old boss is happy to give his seal of approval. "He's a very focused and decisive executive with outstanding leadership qualities. In my view he's exactly what the company needs," says Mr Chisholm.

Mr Ball is well aware that the company faces increased competition from cable operators, which, after a bout of consolidation, are more of a force to be reckoned with.

His biggest challenge, he says, is to make sure BSkyB has content which marks it out from its rivals. "Content matters. At the end of the day, I don't think anyone's concerned about the technology, it's what can be delivered by the technology."

BSkyB's control of sports programming is important, and Mr Ball is trying to persuade the Office of Fair Trading that BSkyB should be given access to the European Champions League football rights owned by its rival, On Digital. But, like Mr Booth before him, he argues that BSkyB needs to attract new subscribers by improving its other programming.

"Sport is always going to be important, but if we keep the sports channel as strong as it is, the entertainment side is something that would need to be made stronger."

Unlike Mr Booth, who couldn't name Manchester United's left back, even though BSkyB had put in a bid for the team, Mr Ball has no shortage of passion for British sport, and even admits to being an Arsenal supporter. But he also says he's a "filmaholic", and often used to watch three a day in Los Angeles. Now he will have to make do with BSkyB's 60 movie channels.