Alan Yentob’s final interview set to air on BBC

Alan Yentob’s last interview will air on BBC Two on Sunday (8 June), the broadcaster has confirmed.

Yentob, the presenter and long-time BBC executive, died in May at the age of 78.

His final programme will be an interview with the artist Jenny Saville, titled When Alan Yentob Met Jenny Saville.

The documentary is set to air as part of a special tribute night on BBC Two and iPlayer, featuring some of the presenter’s best-loved films, including his interviews with David Bowie, Salman Rushdie and Mel Brooks.

Yentob had been working with Saville on a film for his Imagine documentary series before his death and persuaded the artist, who rose to fame during the Young British Artists (YBAs) movement of the late Eighties and early Nineties, to allow cameras into her studio for the first time in nearly three decades.

“Alan and I were beginning to work on a documentary about my paintings from across the years,” Saville said. “It was an honour to know Alan, who I’d met in my early twenties and we reconnected to make this film.”

open image in gallery

Suzy Klein, the BBC’s head of arts and classical music TV, hailed Yentob as “a titan of arts broadcasting” and described his last interview as a “testament to his relentless curiosity and advocacy for the arts across many decades”.

News of Yentob’s death was confirmed by his wife Philippa Walker, who described the Arena host as “curious, funny, annoying, late and creative in every cell of his body” as well as “the kindest of men and a profoundly moral man”.

open image in gallery

Yentob joined the BBC in 1968 as a trainee and would later secure unprecedented access to David Bowie to film the documentary Cracked Actor.

He became the controller of BBC Two in 1988 and later took on the same role at BBC One between 1993 and 1997. In 2004, he was announced as the broadcaster’s creative director.

He commissioned hit BBC shows such as Absolutely Fabulous, the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, Have I Got News for You and Wallace & Gromit.

In a tribute, BBC director-general Tim Davie said that Yentob was “a towering figure in British broadcasting and the arts” and “cultural visionary” who “shaped decades of programming at the BBC and beyond”.