BBC arts broadcaster dies aged 78

Alan Yentob, the long-serving BBC arts broadcaster and documentary-maker, has died aged 78.

Yentob profiled and interviewed a variety of essential cultural and artistic figures through the years, together with David Bowie, Charles Saatchi, Maya Angelou and Grayson Perry, for TV sequence equivalent to Omnibus, Arena and Imagine.

He additionally served as controller of BBC One and Two, and the organisation’s inventive director and head of music and humanities throughout an extended and different profession.

Paying tribute to her late husband, Philippa Walker described Yentob as “curious, humorous, annoying, late and artistic in each cell of his physique” and added that he was “the kindest of males”.

BBC director-general Tim Davie referred to as him a “inventive pressure and cultural visionary” who championed “originality, risk-taking and inventive ambition”.

He added: “To work with Alan was to be impressed and inspired to assume larger. He had a uncommon reward for figuring out expertise and lifting others up – a mentor and champion to so many throughout the worlds of tv, movie and theatre.

“Above all, Alan was a real authentic. His ardour wasn’t performative – it was private. He believed within the energy of tradition to counterpoint, problem and join us.”

Yentob was identified for his connections within the leisure trade, usually befriending his well-known movie topics who included music stars Jay-Z and Beyoncé, actors and filmmakers Orson Welles and Mel Brooks, and creator Salman Rushdie.

Synonymous with the BBC, Yentob was seen by viewers participating in an arm wrestle with Rushdie whereas listening to opera in a scene taken from W1A – a sitcom which satirised life on the company.

Yentob’s well-known 1975 Omnibus characteristic, Cracked Actor, about David Bowie, confirmed the drug-addled star opening as much as him at the back of a limousine at an “intensely inventive time”, the filmmaker later recalled, but additionally on the singer’s most “fragile and exhausted”.

Yentob turned controller of BBC Two in 1988, making him one of many youngest channel controllers within the company’s historical past.

He oversaw a well-liked and influential interval for the channel, with commissions equivalent to hit sitcom Absolutely Fabulous – the place his title was dropped into the dialogue of 1 episode as an in-joke

Other exhibits launched throughout his tenure included The Late Show and Have I Got News for You.

Yentob’s success within the function noticed him promoted to controller of BBC One from 1993 to 1997, earlier than a stint as BBC tv’s total director of programmes.

He was introduced because the company’s inventive director in 2004, a job he crammed for greater than a decade. But he continued to step in entrance of the digital camera to entrance extra Imagine programmes, together with the ultimate episode of that sequence, a profile of comedic duo French & Saunders.

His commissions additionally included a TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and kids’s programmes CBBC and CBeebies.

BBC Radio 4 Today presenter Amol Rajan paid tribute, saying: “He was such a singular and type man: an inconceivable impresario from humble origins who turned a towering determine within the tradition of post-war Britain.

“Modern artwork by no means had a extra loyal ally. His exhibits have been all the time good, usually masterpieces, generally seminal. So a lot of Britain’s finest TV over 5 many years got here by way of his desk. That was public Alan. In personal, he was magnetic, zealous, and really humorous, with a mesmerising voice and mischievous chuckle.”

Yentob’s lengthy and profitable profession on the BBC was not with out controversy.

In 2015, he resigned from his role as the BBC’s creative director, having confronted scrutiny for his function, as chairman, within the monetary mismanagement of the charity Kids Company.

Yentob mentioned the hypothesis over his conduct – which included claims he had tried to affect the BBC protection of the charity’s demise – had been “proving a critical distraction” when the BBC was in “notably difficult instances”.

But within the years that adopted, he continued to make many extra programmes for the broadcaster, and was subsequently appointed a CBE in 2024 for providers to the humanities and media.

He is survived by his spouse, TV producer Philippa Walker, and their two youngsters.