Alan Yentob was what the BBC should be

Let us create a hypothetical situation in which we have a state funded broadcaster in perpetuity. Who would you wish to run this goliath? I know some of you are sullenly answering “Lee Westwood”, but let us move on from the politics of the issue.

I thought about this question when listening to Tony Hall – Lord Hall- lamenting the death of Alan Yentob on the radio yesterday. Tony is a good, decent, man and a very competent administrator. I hope he will not mind too much if I say that in my dealings with him I saw a sharp and wary political intelligence, but no shaft of brilliance and imagination. Put harshly, he is a bureaucrat, as Director Generals almost always are, which is why the BBC is a bureaucracy which only rarely does the extraordinary, because the extraordinary can cause trouble.

Alan Yentob was the precise opposite. I do not know how competent an administrator he was because during my time at the Beeb (and later) I would only occasionally bump into him and he had no power over my little fiefdom. But, hell, he had brilliance. Ideas flowed out of him, one after the other – and most of them were good. Most of them you and I would not have thought of. He had a modernist’s flair for both the high arts and the more down-market stuff. He had a swaggering arrogance. I think it fair to say and name dropped like there was no tomorrow.

But he was able to name drop because artists, high and low, had enormous respect for him and sought him out because he was an anti-bureaucrat and he understood them. In, short he was the very essence of what the BBC should be – a champion of the arts and original, sometimes extraordinary, entertainment – and what at one time the BBC could have been but can never be now, I think.