In the days before the flashing messages of social media, presenters of cultural TV programmes could stride the studios like giants, virtually unchallenged on-screen and off. The BBC grandee Alan Yentob, who has died aged 78, was one such towering figure whose influence reached its zenith when the BBC was well funded and enjoyed high viewership figures. For more than 50 years Yentob created high-quality TV programming on subjects ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Orson Welles, Philip Roth and David Bowie. He profiled Charles Saatchi, Maya Angelou, Grayson Perry, Toni Morrison, Bob Geldof and Kazuo Ishiguro for his TV series Omnibus, Arena and Imagine.
Yentob was said to have changed the course of TV itself. He was both kingmaker and career-breaker – controversially axing Eldorado in 1993, but the list of programmes he brought to BBC2 in its golden years was as diverse as The Late Show, Have I Got News for You, The Office, Strictly Come Dancing and Absolutely Fabulous, always reflecting his keenly felt responsibility to public service broadcasting. The only broadcaster of comparable gravitas is David Attenborough, also once a BBC programme director.
One of the most memorable programmes in his Imagine series was the BBC Young Musician winner Sheku Kanneh-Mason and his talented siblings, hosted by Yentob at a concert from their own home. Imagine was considered a rival to Melvyn Bragg’s The South Bank Show; the two men regarded as the titans of the broadcast arts.
It was as a doyen of arts programmes that Yentob truly made his mark. On a human level, he was considered magnetic and mischievous, happy to wine and dine and chat with aspiring talents. In his earliest days he directed the BBC’s Omnibus, and Cracked Actor, his 1975 profile of David Bowie, raised issues of identity and addiction, controversial in their day.
But Yentob’s reputation was peculiarly mixed. Admired by many, he was also resented for undue influence by those lower in the BBC ranks and in Westminster political circles. He probably understood both points of view and found it hilarious when Private Eye inverted his name to Botney. He also kept his Spitting Image puppet in his study, suggesting: ”It probably counts as racist, but that’s the nature of satire.”
But it was not all pure satire. He coped for years with abuse from the red tops and was awarded £85,000 in damages from the Mirror Group after his phone was hacked. He was also attacked by the Daily Mail after his film about the “Jungle” refugee camp outside Calais in 2016. As his friend, the writer Hanif Kureishi sardonically noted: “A posh Jew prancing around at the public expense. What’s not to hate?”
Tough words of appreciation came from Dame Liz Forgan, director of Channel 4 programmes, who later worked with Yentob at the BBC. She described him as “ludicrously vain, unbelievably snobbish” living “a life which is completely inappropriate and silly. Yet .... does he deliver value sufficiently to justify all those nonsenses? And yes he does by miles.”
One of the warmest collegiate tributes came from Radio 4 Today presenter Amol Rajan, who described Yentob as “such a unique and kind man; an improbable impresario from unlikely origins who became a towering figure in the culture of post-war Britain… His shows were always brilliant, often masterpieces, sometimes seminal… Alan in private was magnetic, zealous and very funny, with a mesmerising voice and mischievous chuckle.” David Baddiel, a participant in Yentob’s 2011 series The Art of Stand-Up, described him as “a king of TV”.
Alan Yentob was one of non-identical twins born to Iraqi Jews, Isaac Reuben Yentob and Flora née Khazam, who moved from Stepney to Manchester after Isaac joined his wife’s family textile business. They later returned to London, and lived in a Park Lane flat. They sent the 12-year-old twins, Alan and Robert, to a cathedral boarding school at King’s Ely in Cambridgeshire, where they were the only Jewish students. “I went to services in my early years, for aesthetic reasons,” recalled Yentob. “When I got older, I opted out, just through laziness.”
Having gained his A-levels a year early, he decided to apply to Oxford, but was told he would not be accepted as he had no Latin. So he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and later at Grenoble University, but graduated in 1968 with a lower-second-class law degree from Leeds University, where he was an enthusiastic participant in student drama. He played a leading part in The Chinese Wall by Max Frisch, which played for a week at the Garrick Theatre – where, to his delight, his features were displayed prominently on publicity posters – and won a Sunday Times award.
He joined the BBC as a trainee in 1968, the sole non-Oxbridge graduate of that year’s intake. His first job was with the World Service, where he was delighted to be surrounded by “all these eccentric, brilliant people from all over the world, speaking in strange languages”. His time there, brief as it was, set the pace for his move into TV as an assistant director on arts programmes, followed by the documentary series Omnibus.
In 1975 he became editor of arts show Arena, which ran for the next ten years. “I was never really appointed. I just did it,” he said. “Nobody interfered and I didn’t show the programmes to anyone before they went out.” He was soon catapulted into the role of controller of BBC2 in 1987 and of BBC1 in 1993. Still in his early forties, he was one of the youngest channel controllers in the broadcaster’s history, while also directing TV programmes on music and arts, drama, and entertainment. Colleagues may have criticised the fact that too much power lay in the hands of executives turned presenters such as him, but this was Yentob’s way; too large a figure to be a deferential programme host, but someone on equal terms with leading figures in the literary, theatrical, musical and cultural worlds.
He famously arm-wrestled with his friend Salman Rushdie in the BBC’s self-satirising comedy WIA – just as actor Hugh Bonneville’s character tentatively walked into the room – and was the first to interview Rushdie after the attack that left the author blind in one eye. Yentob was notorious for being disorganised, to which his wife, Philippa Walker, alluded in her tribute, calling him “funny, annoying, late and creative in every cell of his body”.
In 2004 he became the BBC’s creative director, where apart from commissioning Absolutely Fabulous and The Late Show he also launched the children’s channels CBBC and CBeebies. But he resigned in 2015 after becoming embroiled in a scandal involving financial mismanagement as chairman of the Kids Company charity, which had been founded in 1996 by Camila Batmanghelidjh to support deprived inner-city children. Despite facing criticism from an investigative parliamentary select committee, he was exonerated by an internal BBC inquiry, but four months after the charity’s collapse he resigned as the BBC’s creative director, relinquishing an estimated annual income of £330,000.
But retirement was far from Yentob’s mind. He returned to his great passion – making and presenting TV programmes for the BBC, including the Imagine series, interviewing celebrities from the worlds of art, film, music, literature and dance. Programme making was his true passion, he admitted, rather than administration. “There is a pleasure in helping others to realise what they want to do. But I enjoy making things better.” In 2024 he was appointed CBE for services to the arts and media.
In his time Alan Yentob was a beacon of ultimate creative programming, promoting quality above ratings. In the current era of streaming and Instagram, we will probably not see his like again. He is survived by his wife, Philippa Walker, a TV producer, their son Jacob and daughter Bella.
Alan Yentob: born March 11, 1947. Died May 24, 2025
