Tradition reporter
AlamyBecause the face of documentary sequence like Area, Think about and Omnibus, Alan Yentob was normally seen interviewing the most important names within the arts and leisure.
However viewers could not have realised the extent to which the broadcaster helped form the very TV channels he appeared on.
Having begun his profession as a documentary maker, Yentob went on to carry just about each main job in BBC tv, together with working each BBC One and BBC Two.
As a commissioner of programmes, he launched audiences to such perennial favourites as Completely Fabulous, Have I Received Information for You and Wallace and Gromit.
Like Sir David Attenborough earlier than him, Yentob’s profession ultimately noticed him return to his old flame – film-making – turning into a cultural determine in his personal proper.
Alan Yentob was born in Stepney, east London, in 1947, the son of Jewish immigrants from Iraq.
The household moved to Manchester earlier than returning to a flat on London’s Park Lane – the place the visitors noise was so unhealthy that he struggled to do his homework.
Regardless of attending an costly non-public faculty, his grades weren’t fairly ok for Oxford. So Yentob hung out on the Sorbonne in Paris, earlier than learning legislation in Leeds – the place he fell head-over-heels in love with drama.
His twin brother Robert did the anticipated factor and joined the household textile enterprise. Alan was decided to not.
In 1968, he utilized for a BBC traineeship – with an software verging on cocky.
He wrote: “My dramatic debut on the age of 9 in The Merry Wives of Windsor was greeted with a gratifying critique by one among my contemporaries: ‘You must be a movie star, cos you’ve got bought smashing legs’.”
By some means, it labored. Yentob joined the trainee scheme as the one non-Oxbridge recruit of his yr group.
A number of years later, having solely made one quick movie, about Dave Prowse – the actor who performed Inexperienced Cross Code man and supplied the on-screen presence of Darth Vader – Yentob hit the large time.
Cracked Actor, his fly-on-the-wall documentary about David Bowie, portrayed a mentally fragile pop star scuffling with cocaine dependancy.
“Our encounters tended to happen in lodge rooms within the early hours of the morning, or in snatched conversations behind limousines,” Yentob recalled.
“He was fragile and exhausted, but additionally ready to open up and discuss in a means he had by no means actually executed earlier than.”
Rolling Stone journal later referred to as it the “biggest rockumentary ever”.
Quickly afterwards, Yentob was requested to take over BBC arts programme Area.
He ditched its journal format and turned it right into a sequence of documentaries on topics like Mel Brooks (who grew to become godfather to Yentob’s youngsters), Orson Welles, and even the Ford Cortina.
A decade later, he was poached to turn out to be the BBC’s head of music and humanities, and started a fast ascent of the company’s hierarchy.
As one of many youngest ever controllers of BBC Two, he let Jennifer Saunders rip with Completely Fabulous, her comedy in regards to the world of trend and PR. She even dropped his identify into one episode as an in-joke.
He launched a reside arts dialogue programme referred to as The Late Present, introduced Nick Park’s beloved Wallace and Gromit to a nationwide viewers, and gave an obscure motoring journalist by the identify of Jeremy Clarkson his first go at presenting Prime Gear.
In so doing, Yentob was credited with blowing off the cobwebs at BBC Two within the face of a brand new inventive powerhouse within the tv panorama: Channel 4.
In 1993, he was promoted to run BBC One – the place one among his first duties was to axe the channel’s largest funding for years, Eldorado, the sunshine and sangria cleaning soap set in Spain.
The set close to Malaga had value £2m to construct, however the clunky plot traces and poor sound high quality have been, Yentob insisted, damaging the community’s model.
By 2002, the media panorama was quickly altering. Yentob launched youngsters’s channels CBBC and CBeebies in his new position because the company’s director of drama, leisure and kids’s – revolutionising the viewing habits of children beforehand restricted to an hour or two of reveals after faculty.
Wearing his trademark go well with and trainers, he helped fee new reveals like The Workplace, The Thick of It and Life on Mars – in addition to overhauling classics like Physician Who.
TV govt Wayne Garvie, who labored for the BBC’s business arm, believed Yentob was one of many company’s most inventive forces.
“When the BBC was creating reveals like Dragons’ Den, launching CBBC, making comedies like The Workplace – who was the person overseeing manufacturing at the moment? Yentob,” he told the Guardian in 2015. “It is by no means been the identical since.”
The folowing yr, the newspaper’s Sam Knight described him as “Britain’s most influential TV govt of the final half-century”.
In 2004, Yentob was introduced because the company’s inventive director. It was a fairly amorphous position that gave him licence to have his say virtually in all places.
It additionally allowed him room to step again in entrance of the digicam to current a brand new sequence, Think about.
It ran for 20 years, exploring each nook of the world of the humanities together with encounters with rapper Jay-Z, arts supremo Charles Saatchi, comic Billy Connolly, and his outdated pal Mel Brooks.
There was controversy when it was claimed the programme had used photographs of him nodding throughout interviews he had not performed – creating the misunderstanding he had been current. However a workers investigation reportedly discovered that no faux “noddies” had ever been broadcast.
His bills got here beneath scrutiny when he claimed £3,381 for a enterprise class flight from London to New York for filming.
However worse was to come back in 2015 when a youngsters’s charity of which he was chairman – Children Firm – collapsed.
He was accused of failing to correctly oversee the organisation’s funds, with questions requested a couple of £3m authorities mortgage that had been issued shortly earlier than it folded.
There have been grumblings from inside BBC Information that Yentob tried to affect journalists towards working the story and, ultimately, he resigned as inventive director.
Yentob continued to entrance Think about, making memorable portraits of writers like Maya Angelou, architect Frank Gehry and artist Rachel Whiteread.
However even the best-connected man in British tv couldn’t stop the sequence from being virtually solely axed in 2023.
With arts programmes struggling to ship worldwide gross sales, the BBC introduced it will solely fee the occasional one-off particular.
Having been appointed a CBE within the 2024 New 12 months Honours Listing, he sat down for an interview together with his outdated pal, Sir Salman Rushdie.
The controversial writer was nonetheless recovering from an assassination try, and spoke movingly about how members of the general public had tried to save lots of him.
It was to be one among Yentob’s final main items of labor for the BBC – an organisation he had been a lot a part of for almost 60 years.
And, having by no means misplaced his enthusiasm and creativity throughout that precipitate rise by means of the ranks of BBC senior administration, he had a particular bond with lots of these he interviewed.
“As an govt,” the late Australian broadcaster Clive James as soon as mentioned, Alan Yentob “was extra of an artist than the artists.”
