Creative giant of BBC TV, on screen and off

As the face of documentary series like Arena, Imagine and Omnibus, Alan Yentob was usually seen interviewing the biggest names in the arts and entertainment.

But viewers may not have realised the extent to which the broadcaster helped shape the very TV channels he appeared on.

Having begun his career as a documentary maker, Yentob went on to hold virtually every major job in BBC television, including running both BBC One and BBC Two.

As a commissioner of programmes, he introduced audiences to such perennial favourites as Absolutely Fabulous, Have I Got News for You and Wallace and Gromit.

Like Sir David Attenborough before him, Yentob’s career eventually saw him return to his first love – film-making – becoming a cultural figure in his own right.

Alan Yentob was born in Stepney, east London, in 1947, the son of Jewish immigrants from Iraq.

The family moved to Manchester before returning to a flat on London’s Park Lane – where the traffic noise was so bad that he struggled to do his homework.

Despite attending an expensive private school, his grades weren’t quite good enough for Oxford. So Yentob spent time at the Sorbonne in Paris, before studying law in Leeds – where he fell head-over-heels in love with drama.

His twin brother Robert did the expected thing and joined the family textile business. Alan was determined not to.

In 1968, he applied for a BBC traineeship – with an application verging on cocky.

He wrote: “My dramatic debut at the age of nine in The Merry Wives of Windsor was greeted with a gratifying critique by one of my contemporaries: ‘You ought to be a film star, cos you’ve got smashing legs’.”

Somehow, it worked. Yentob joined the trainee scheme as the only non-Oxbridge recruit of his year group.

A few years later, having only made one short film, about Dave Prowse – the actor who played Green Cross Code man and provided the on-screen presence of Darth Vader – Yentob hit the big time.

Cracked Actor, his fly-on-the-wall documentary about David Bowie, portrayed a mentally fragile pop star struggling with cocaine addiction.

“Our encounters tended to take place in hotel rooms in the early hours of the morning, or in snatched conversations in the back of limousines,” Yentob recalled.

“He was fragile and exhausted, but also prepared to open up and talk in a way he had never really done before.”

Rolling Stone magazine later called it the “greatest rockumentary ever”.

Soon afterwards, Yentob was asked to take over BBC arts programme Arena.

He ditched its magazine format and turned it into a series of documentaries on subjects like Mel Brooks (who became godfather to Yentob’s children), Orson Welles, and even the Ford Cortina.

A decade later, he was poached to become the BBC’s head of music and arts, and began a rapid ascent of the corporation’s hierarchy.

As one of the youngest ever controllers of BBC Two, he let Jennifer Saunders rip with Absolutely Fabulous, her comedy about the world of fashion and PR. She even dropped his name into one episode as an in-joke.

He introduced a live arts discussion programme called The Late Show, brought Nick Park’s beloved Wallace and Gromit to a national audience, and gave an obscure motoring journalist by the name of Jeremy Clarkson his first go at presenting Top Gear.

In so doing, Yentob was credited with blowing off the cobwebs at BBC Two in the face of a new creative powerhouse in the television landscape: Channel 4.

In 1993, he was promoted to run BBC One – where one of his first tasks was to axe the channel’s biggest investment for years, Eldorado, the sunshine and sangria soap set in Spain.

The set near Malaga had cost £2m to build, but the clunky plot lines and poor sound quality were, Yentob insisted, damaging the network’s brand.

By 2002, the media landscape was rapidly changing. Yentob launched children’s channels CBBC and CBeebies in his new role as the corporation’s director of drama, entertainment and children’s – revolutionising the viewing habits of kids previously restricted to an hour or two of shows after school.

Dressed in his trademark suit and trainers, he helped commission new shows like The Office, The Thick of It and Life on Mars – as well as overhauling classics like Doctor Who.

TV executive Wayne Garvie, who worked for the BBC’s commercial arm, believed Yentob was one of the corporation’s most creative forces.

“When the BBC was creating shows like Dragons’ Den, launching CBBC, making comedies like The Office – who was the man overseeing production at that time? Yentob,” he told the Guardian in 2015. “It’s never been the same since.”

The folowing year, the newspaper’s Sam Knight described him as “Britain’s most influential TV executive of the last half-century”.

In 2004, Yentob was announced as the corporation’s creative director. It was a rather amorphous role that gave him licence to have his say almost everywhere.

It also allowed him room to step back in front of the camera to present a new series, Imagine.

It ran for 20 years, exploring every corner of the world of the arts including encounters with rapper Jay-Z, arts supremo Charles Saatchi, comedian Billy Connolly, and his old friend Mel Brooks.

There was controversy when it was claimed the programme had used shots of him nodding during interviews he had not conducted – creating the false impression he had been present. But a staff investigation reportedly found that no fake “noddies” had ever been broadcast.

His expenses came under scrutiny when he claimed £3,381 for a business class flight from London to New York for filming.

But worse was to come in 2015 when a children’s charity of which he was chairman – Kids Company – collapsed.

He was accused of failing to properly oversee the organisation’s finances, with questions asked about a £3m government loan that had been issued shortly before it folded.

There were grumblings from within BBC News that Yentob tried to influence journalists against running the story and, eventually, he resigned as creative director.

Yentob continued to front Imagine, making memorable portraits of writers like Maya Angelou, architect Frank Gehry and artist Rachel Whiteread.

But even the best-connected man in British television could not prevent the series from being almost entirely axed in 2023.

With arts programmes struggling to deliver international sales, the BBC announced it would only commission the occasional one-off special.

Having been appointed a CBE in the 2024 New Year Honours List, he sat down for an interview with his old friend, Sir Salman Rushdie.

The controversial author was still recovering from an assassination attempt, and spoke movingly about how members of the public had tried to save him.

It was to be one of Yentob’s last major pieces of work for the BBC – an organisation he had been so much part of for nearly 60 years.

And, having never lost his enthusiasm and creativity during that precipitate rise through the ranks of BBC senior management, he had a special bond with many of those he interviewed.

“As an executive,” the late Australian broadcaster Clive James once said, Alan Yentob “was more of an artist than the artists.”