Alan Yentob showed why the arts merit a place in mainstream programming

Yentob’s passing feels like the closing of an era. These days, arts documentaries are most likely to be found on subscription channels. There are no mainstream cultural programmes on the BBC and ITV.

Alan Yentob at The BBC (via Alamy/ 2FA2A5R)

Alan Yentob, who has just died at the age of 78, embodied BBC arts programming for more than forty years as a television producer and director, as a BBC executive and spokesman, and ultimately as a presenter of the Imagine documentary series between 2003 and 2023.

Alan got to know everybody in the media world and wasn’t shy about it. There was no doubt which particular “Mick” he was on his way to see, when we bumped into each other in an airport lounge. Depicted in a contemporary opera, his character inevitably sang a “name-dropping” aria. In turn, the stars loved him – the Pet Shop Boys, French and Saunders and Jeremy Clarkson were just some of those paying tribute to him this week.

In truth, Alan’s enthusiasm for people, his love of the arts and popular culture, his fealty to the BBC and television, and his intelligence were irrepressible. His wife Philippa Walker described him perfectly as "curious, funny, annoying, late and creative in every cell of his body" and adding that he was "the kindest of men".

Thankfully, the mighty Melvyn Bragg is still at work at the age of 85 yet Alan Yentob’s passing nonetheless feels like the closing of an era when “public service” broadcasters felt that coverage of the arts merited a place in mainstream programming, alongside sport, news, drama and light entertainment.

Arts television was effectively a British gift to the world, pioneered by the post-war generation of “grammar school boys” (they were mostly men). Their programmes captured the cultural liberation powered by the “swinging sixties”. Subject matter ranged from “high culture” to pop culture, treating Paul McCartney or John Le Carré with the same enthusiasm and curiosity as Sir Edward Elgar or John Donne.

A succession of major documentary programmes provided the spine for showcasing the arts to prime time audiences. The BBC’s Monitor, which launched in 1956, was the original model. The editor and sometime presenter, Huw Wheldon, had a distinguished record of military service in the Second World War. He employed young programme makers of exceptional talent including the film directors John Schlesinger and Ken Russell, Humphrey Burton and Melvyn Bragg.

Monitor’s run ended in 1965, only to be replaced two years later by Omnibus which aired until 2003. Alan Yentob made his name in 1975 with his Omnibus profile of David Bowie, Cracked Actor.

Meanwhile, Humphrey Burton moved to ITV as a presenter of a rival arts programme. Until then, defections from the national broadcaster were rare and much frowned upon. Aquarius took its name from the “age of Aquarius” popularised by the rock musical Hair. Peter Hall, director of the National Theatre, was another presenter. Aquarius's most celebrated episodes were a rare interview with the painter Francis Bacon by the art historian David Sylvester and a feature on Salvador Dali presented by the chat show host Russell Harty, in which the surrealist artist threw his two pet ocelot cats into a swimming pool. Such subjects might be considered elitist today; then they were prescient and news-making.

Melvyn Bragg fronted a number of arts strands at the BBC in the 1970s including Read All About It, a talk show about new paperbacks featuring icons such as Edna O’Brien, Martin Amis and Lady Antonia Fraser. Inevitably, the Beatles “Paperback Writer” provided the title music. Simultaneously, Robert Robinson presided over the more staid Book Programme on BBC 2. Programmes about books are now things of the past – though reading remains a popular activity and literary festivals are sold out.

In 1978, Bragg moved to ITV and launched the long-running South Bank Show. The same year Yentob branched off to start the arts documentary series Arena on BBC2, which lasted until 1985 and covered subjects ranging from James Joyce to the Ford Cortina Car.

Alan also served as a senior BBC executive, giving him an influence in the BBC, as both “talent” and “a suit” perhaps equivalent to David Attenborough, who was a fellow former channel “controller”. Displaying his popular and populist instincts, Yentob commissioned many popular series including Absolutely Fabulous, Strictly Come Dancing, The Office, and Have I Got News for You.

He took his leadership role on behalf of the BBC seriously and would defend the corporation in public when others shrank away. The last time I spoke to him he was going where the Director General and other bosses feared to tread, discussing the fall of the political journalist and BBC presenter Huw Edwards on the BBC’s Newsnight.

Yentob was not a born administrator however. His conflicting desire to do good and attraction to celebrity led to trouble when Kid’s Company, the high profile charity set-up by the colourful Camila Batmanghelidjh, which he had chaired for nineteen years, collapsed in 2015.

Ever sensitive to his reputation, Alan made a point of telling me that an inquiry cleared him of trying to influence BBC news coverage of Kid’s company disaster and that he won a court case to overturn his disqualification as a company director. He once told me how disappointed he was that I had not attended a tribute evening to him at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. I had not realised it was a personal invitation. He was awarded a CBE in 2024.

Alan’s personality was very different from the austere workaholic Lord Bragg or the self-effacing Attenborough - as those quoted in his obituary in The Times make clear. “A posh Jew poncing around at public expense, what’s not to like?”, his friend Hanif Kureishi commented sarcastically. The verdict of Dame Liz Forgan, a fellow powerful media figure, is more forthright: “Ludicrously vain, unbelievably snobbish and lives a life that is completely inappropriate and silly…” but “Does he deliver value sufficiently to justify all those nonsenses? And yes he does by miles.”

Forgan hits the bullseye. In his work, Alan knew what would entertain the public – and he recognised the self-evident fact that the arts have their part to play in that – as well as entertaining and informing. There are no mainstream cultural programmes on the BBC and ITV today. Bragg’s The South Bank Show disappeared from ITV in 2013. The last Imagine, pushed to late night in the schedule, was in 2023. Other recent efforts to cover the arts on terrestrial TV have been either patronising or hopelessly self-satisfied and excluding.

These days, arts documentaries are most likely to be found on subscription channels – catering to the long tail of fragmented audiences rather than mainstream viewing. The South Bank Show has found a home on Sky Arts, which has the most impressive roster of arts coverage in the UK. The BBC satisfies itself with re-runs of former glories from the archive.

National broadcasters no longer seem to care and the current Labour government is said to be considering the abolition of the culture department, DCMS – which was set-up by the Conservative prime minister John Major, another member of the post-war generation. Yet the arts remain one of this country’s most remunerative exports and sources of “soft power” as well as an essential strand of human life.

Alan Yentob will be much missed.