Alan Yentob

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My Costaway this week is a television executive. He comes from a family of Sephardic Iraqi Jews and was brought up in Manchester and London. He was sent, curiously, to a cathedral boarding school, and after leaving university, he joined the BBC and he's been there ever since. In a career spanning 27 years, he's risen steadily through the ranks, becoming the head of music and arts and ending up as the only man to have run both its television channels. His crumpled suits and unpredictability disguise an orthodox corporate temperament. He says that at school he was a comfortable outsider, a phrase that could equally apply to his career at the BBC. He is currently the controller of BBC One, Alan Yentob. Does that strike you as fair, Alan? Do you see yourself as an outsider?

Alan Yentob1:15

Well maybe it's a sort of delusion of mine. If you've been uh ensconced in the BBC for that many years, perhaps you can't call yourself an outsider. But yes, I suppose coming from an immigrant family, a term that my mother still doesn't like me to use, but uh I find that that kind of otherness you have is something that uh is is valuable.

Presenter1:35

But also professionally it seems to me you take a pride, don't you, in being unpredictable, as I said, in being a bit of a maverick.

Alan Yentob1:43

Well, that's how my career began as a maverick. As for the crumpled suits, I remember reading about my wearing Armani suits some years ago, fif twelve years ago, before I'd ever known know how to spell Armani a little and I thought, Well, that's a good idea, maybe I'll buy one.

Presenter1:56

But the relevance of this is that you run now BBC One, which is a mass audience channel, it has to have broad popular appeal.

Presenter2:04

Isn't that more difficult for you because you are not a conventional chap?

Alan Yentob2:09

I think it's a a difficult, ambitious thing to do for anybody, frankly. And perhaps because I ran BBC Two, people thought, well, he's a sort of minority man, an elitist, or what have you. But the big idea of the BBC is that all kinds of things should be accessible to a large audience. So the challenge of that is a considerable one, and I can't.

Presenter2:28

But can you cultivate the common touch if it doesn't come naturally to you, which is what we've been saying?

Alan Yentob2:32

Well, I don't think I haven't got the common touch. I don't think I'm a distant uh uh sort of

Presenter2:38

Metropolitan Trendy

Alan Yentob2:39

No, I don't think I'm that at all. I think uh my experience is very wide-ranging. I have lots of enthusiasms, I'm got very eclectic tastes. I don't think there's anything contrived about that. But making, you know, running a channel which has to have popular drama on and getting it right, uh uh being able to draw an audience into programmes is a big task for anyone, you know.

Presenter3:01

It seems like the most difficult job you've ever done.

Alan Yentob3:03

It's a difficult job, but that would be like a wine. It's also the most exhilarating job. As I have said, BBC Two was a wonderful job. So was running music and arts. I've been very lucky.

Presenter3:11

Well, I want to go into more detail about all of that and how you do it in a moment. But tell me first about Alan Yentob on a desert island and his music. How honed are these eight records we're about to hear?

Alan Yentob3:23

They're all chosen for different reasons, I think, all of them. Some of them because they remind me of places and people are a trigger in some way. Others because they're just beautiful. They all they all have in common that the human voice is somehow at the center of them in some way.

Presenter3:36

Tell me the first one.

Alan Yentob3:37

The first is a piece from Act One of Tosca, and really it's because it's callous. It was a recording that I remember seeing. It came live from Covent Garden. Just one act of it was transmitted by Granada Television. It was one of the first pieces of opera on television I ever saw. And also because when I was a child we had a help who used to come in who's Italian and who used to play, started with Mariolanza Records. I always used to think he was in the house. I was used to the radio, but she'd say, I'll ask him to sing again if you like, if you go to sleep. And then one day she played Callus. And so this is a piece that reminds me of that period really, and the beginnings.

Speaker 44:14

Sing the saint of peace of fate, the saints of horse.

Speaker 44:40

Leaving what the sideboard

Presenter5:13

The duet from Act One of Puccini's Tosca sung by Maria Callis and Carlo Bergonzi. Um in fact, Tosca made broadcasting history, didn't it, when you put it on live from Rome a few years ago, when you were controller two.

Alan Yentob5:25

This was a an audacious idea, which was to do this opera live from the locations and at the times for which, you know, Puccini wrote them. It was preposterous really. And then they did it and my goodness, it worked. It was the point.

Presenter5:39

But that's the point about um running BBC Two, isn't it? You can make it your own, you can indulge your own tastes, and that's what you did there. In a sense, you can't do that at BBC One, can you? It's everybody else's taste, not yours.

Alan Yentob5:51

Well, there are certain isms on BBC One and they have to be there. You know, you have to get certain things right. And no, you don't just do the things you want to do. There is a place somewhere for them. You can your standards, your judgments about what is good and whether it comes up to scratch is important.

Presenter6:07

But what it has to be is two things at the same time, doesn't it? It has to be both popular and distinctive. Now it's easy to be one or the other. If you want to be popular, you just run Neighbours wall to war. If you want to be distinctive, you just put Middlemarch wall to war. But can are the two things compatible actually? Isn't that what the great struggle is?

Alan Yentob6:24

Yes, the popular and distinctive, well, private life of plants, David Attenborough, that has to be. The new season that we're doing, this 26-part series, The People's Century, to tell the story of the 20th century for a mass audience in 26 hours. Now, those are parts of what you do. At the same time, there is a place, if you like, for the kinds, even when you do game shows and things, I suppose you try to do them as well as you possibly can.

Presenter6:50

But what you haven't got and what BBC One has consistently failed to achieve over the past few years is it hasn't got those good, strong, popular drama series other than casualty that underpin all of those other things, as you say. Now why not? It begins to look like more than bad luck. I T V has a plethora of them, from from Cracker to Prime Suspect to London's Burning to Peak Practice Heartbeat, all of them getting way in excess of fifty percent of the viewing figures when they're on.

Alan Yentob7:17

Well, that was the story two years ago, eighteen months ago, when I had been running a channel for eighteen months and I think the turnaround has been remarkable. In 18 months, all those shows which were not working have come off the screen. We now have shows like Commerce Muck, which won the BAFTA Award for Best Series. We have Hamish Macbeth coming from Scotland. We have Dangerfield at the same time. We have Roddy Doyle. We have Bugs. We have a whole new run of programmes.

Presenter7:42

But they're not pulling more than 50% of the audience.

Alan Yentob7:44

And now let's be clear about this, Sue. I do not, you know, one of my colleagues referred to stonkers, which is what you're referring to. Blockbusters, we mean by stonkon. Blockbusters, yes. I haven't aimed just to have blockbusters on the channel. I've aimed to get shows achieving substantial audiences, that might be nine or ten million, and some will grow to more than that. But I haven't set out to get as many stonkers as I can to get a lot of money.

Presenter7:52

Yeah.

Presenter8:06

But you you've only got one casualty is my point. I mean you'd love to have surely you'd love to have a touch of frost or inspector morse or

Alan Yentob8:09

No we have

Presenter8:13

A band of gold, any of the other ones I've mentioned?

Alan Yentob8:16

Those shows take time to come. They took ITV a long time. They went through a barren period. I want to put interesting work on reaching large audiences. I think the blockbusters will come.

Presenter8:25

Critics would argue that they're not there because creativity has been crushed by armies of internal task forces and consultants and so on and market analysis, that somehow program makers, particularly in the drama department, have lost their sureness of touch. Do you think there's something in that?

Alan Yentob8:43

Not really, no. I think there has been tremendous change in the BBC, very difficult changes. And it's been a tricky period, but you're talking about a period as well. You're talking about.

Alan Yentob8:53

big drama hits, okay. There have been less than they should have been. There's been plenty of other good work on the screen. And the BBC's share is is pretty strong. And the range is still there.

Presenter9:03

Record number two.

Alan Yentob9:06

Well, my second choice is South Pacific. This was the first.

Alan Yentob9:09

colour film I ever saw. I was taken there by one of the many distant relatives of my mother who used to visit the house and take the boys out. And they took us took me to South Pacific. It was an incredibly lurid technicolour and I still have this very vivid memory of it. I remember every song in South Pacific I can sing and so many and many other people share this vice. I can't get the songs out of my head. When I arrived in the BBC James Mossman was in the arts department and this was one of the great journalists of the BBC. He'd been in Southeast Asia and Vietnam, had an incredible career. And I found this incredible weakness in him as well, that he knew all the songs to South Pacific. And he was my mentor in those days and some afternoons when he got

Alan Yentob9:51

Board

Alan Yentob9:52

He'd say, Do you want to come and do South Pacific? So we'd go off in the car and go to the Ritz, and we'd go to a corner of the Ritz Hotel in London. We'd have tea and we'd sing all the songs from South Pacific.

Speaker 410:04

Some enchanted evening

Speaker 410:09

Some one may be laughing You may hear her laughing across a crowded room

Speaker 410:23

And night after night

Speaker 410:29

As strange as it seems.

Presenter10:34

Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, sung by Giorgio Tozzi. Tell me about your origins then, Alan Yentob. The family we said of Sephardic Iraqi Jews. When when did they come to this country?

Alan Yentob10:47

Well, my mother

Alan Yentob10:49

came um in during the war years and my father came later. Most of the Jews who were in Iraq really fled at the time of the creation of Palestine and they really life wasn't safe for them at that time. I I was born in in London myself.

Alan Yentob11:02

And we lived my my father went into business with my uncle, who's a very

Alan Yentob11:08

A brilliant man and a s a scholar, really, but who felt he had to support his family and uh

Alan Yentob11:13

lived in Manchester and um they were in the textile industry and

Presenter11:17

And it became Dent's gloves, didn't it?

Alan Yentob11:19

Well, that's part of the family business that yes, became the gloves and my brother runs that business and the textile business. And we still have roots, quite deep roots in Manchester.

Presenter11:29

Were you supposed to run it as well, this business?

Alan Yentob11:31

Well, certainly I could have. I think my my uncle and my father are a bit disappointed at first and was sort of rather quizzical about the BBC. But um

Presenter11:40

But did you always did you always intend to give textiles a wide berth?

Alan Yentob11:44

I certainly did. I had no intention whatsoever of getting into that. Although I was a great.

Alan Yentob11:49

Fan of my father and m and my uncle's.

Presenter11:52

And you, according to your brother, were rather demanding as a boy. I came across a a quote in your cutting saying he always wanted to be the centre of attention. Does that ring true?

Alan Yentob12:01

No, complete lie.

Alan Yentob12:04

Yes, I I was a bit of a show off. My father w found w hadn't a lot of patience for it. Uh my mother indulged it as mothers are wont to. And it was a house in which you could be a performer because there were so many visitors.

Presenter12:04

Yeah.

Alan Yentob12:16

I was indulged, I think, in that sense.

Presenter12:18

And are you still, and do you still need to be?

Alan Yentob12:21

Well, I suppose if you're the controller of BBC One, uh more people indulge you uh than should. But um

Alan Yentob12:28

Perhaps less so than I was in those days.

Presenter12:30

But do you need it? I mean, is it part of your character?

Alan Yentob12:33

But need to

Presenter12:34

What the centre stage?

Alan Yentob12:37

I suppose it would be a lie to say that I didn't quite enjoy that, yes.

Presenter12:42

Your your headmaster while I'm quoting blasts from the past as you hear your your headmaster describes you as very eager and hard working, but inclined to make up the end before considering the means.

Alan Yentob12:45

Don't you hear me?

Alan Yentob12:55

Probably. I think that's oddly enough, now you say that, it sounds quite sensible to me. So they'll take that and write it down and pursue it.

Presenter13:02

It surely can't do in the BBC of today. You've got to know where the means are.

Alan Yentob13:06

Not at all. I I think that that if that says, you know, have some vision and uh and then try to get there and don't worry about how you're going to get there, just get on the road. Uh yes, I I am a b I I think that sounds a bit silly, but I mean if you don't have the vision you're not you've got nowhere to go, so why take the start the journey? So that's probably true and it's probably a failing as well.

Presenter13:25

He was the headmaster of of this public cathedral school that you went to that you and your brother, twin brother, we should say, were were sent to. That was a curious decision, wasn't it, to send you to a cathedral school?

Alan Yentob13:30

She said

Alan Yentob13:35

We certainly were the only two Jewish boys at this cathedral school. I never really wanted to go to boarding school. I didn't I kind of felt I'd been sent away and we just arrived two or three years earlier from Manchester and London was, you know, fabulous and I w I wanted to be in London. And I was a bit of a mummy's boy anyway, so I felt

Alan Yentob13:52

sort of thrown out. So I sort of essentially I thought why am I here?

Alan Yentob13:57

I'm not too much of a country boy either, really, although I'm kinda trying to get into it again. But once I was there I parked myself and I got on with it.

Presenter14:04

But that's why you felt a bit like the outsider, is it?'Cause A you wanted to be on the outside and in any cases you say you were the only Jewish boys there?

Alan Yentob14:11

Yes, although I've never felt myself anti-Semitism in any way, but I certainly didn't feel that I was a typical

Alan Yentob14:19

product of of that sort of minor public school system.

Presenter14:22

Tell me about record number three.

Alan Yentob14:24

Well record number three is

Alan Yentob14:26

I have to say, you know, it's I do feel genuinely that what

Alan Yentob14:29

What a privilege it is, what a learning privilege it is having had the job that I've had.

Alan Yentob14:34

Uh you know, going to music and arts department and discovering things that were termed Billy Holliday, for instance, I'd never I didn't really know about. I knew her name, but I hadn't listened to her voice.

Alan Yentob14:45

On the records, and we made a film about Billie Holiday, and I did, and I was, you know, I was entranced. And this song is.

Alan Yentob14:54

Called Strange Fruit, sung by Billie Holiday. It's an extraordinary song because it's about.

Alan Yentob14:59

The lynching that went on in the South in America.

Alan Yentob15:03

The strange fruit is the body on the on the tree, hanging on the tree. It's n it's an amazing record.

Speaker 415:09

Solon tree.

Speaker 415:12

Fair a strange rule.

Speaker 415:16

Blood on the leaves.

Speaker 415:19

And blood at the roof.

Speaker 415:24

Black bird is swinging.

Speaker 415:27

In the solo breeze.

Speaker 415:32

Strange fruit hanging.

Speaker 415:35

Uh

Presenter15:35

From the papnot.

Presenter15:38

Billy Holiday and Strange Fruit. It was obviously a a good school, Alan Yentob, or you were an exceptional pupil'cause you passed your A levels, age sixteen, and went off to study in France for a couple of years before um going to university here, Leeds, to read law. Um but you apparently concentrated rather harder on the drama.

Alan Yentob15:56

When I went to university, I was convinced I was going to do law. I decided that I could have read English somewhere else, but I wanted to read law. But there was a very good dramatic society at Leeds and a lot of talented people in it. So I got absorbed in the theatre and I acted early on and then I started to write. In fact, we came to London and I acted in a play which was directed by the BBC's head of serials, Michael Waring, as it happens.

Presenter16:22

So your name was in likes in the website.

Alan Yentob16:24

I was I had I had Margaret Layton's dressing room and I had my

Alan Yentob16:29

Photo blown up, sort of much larger than life size, outside the Garrack theatre.

Presenter16:34

And then it was nineteen sixty eight and you entered the BBC never to leave again, as we've said, twenty seven years. Um you were the only non-Oxbridge general trainee of your year and what's more you had a a second class degree to boot. That would have made you very unusual. I mean they they always took Oxbridge people and if they didn't you certainly had to have a first class degree.

Alan Yentob16:52

I think they thought he could just as well be Oxbridge, so we'll take him. It was one of those names if you don't

Presenter16:57

So

Alan Yentob16:58

So I don't know if I'd give any marks to the BBC for that.

Presenter16:59

So I don't know if I give any

Speaker 417:01

Uh

Alan Yentob17:03

Well, only that I I was sort of

Alan Yentob17:06

confident, uh, you know, I I could have gone to Oxford to read English anyway.

Presenter17:10

But you are off the place, said Oxford.

Alan Yentob17:12

I would I w I was going to go to to read English, but I didn't. I went I wanted to read law and I had to take Latin, so I waited another year and went to France and came back and went to Leeds.

Alan Yentob17:24

But um I never did no I never did do Latin.

Presenter17:24

So you go to the next one.

Presenter17:26

You got in on this very rarefied general trainee scheme. I mean they would only have taken a half dozen people a year, if that.

Alan Yentob17:29

Yeah.

Alan Yentob17:32

I got in, yes, and the first place I went to was Bush House.

Alan Yentob17:36

which I absolutely adored, you know. It was um it was like the Tower of Babel in uh the Aldwich, you know, I mean, it never n never went to sleep. There were all these people who spoke different languages all over the place. The canteen was a kind of a mock

Alan Yentob17:49

with emigres and uh revolutionaries and uh would-be revolutionaries. And this was the time room. It was near the LSC and this was a time of the student riots, it was a time of the great uh the turbulent events, they seem less great in retrospect, but it was certainly lively at the time in in Paris. So it was a very interesting time to be there.

Presenter18:08

Yeah. But

Speaker 318:08

Uh

Presenter18:09

Backward.

Speaker 318:09

Yeah.

Alan Yentob18:10

Well, there's a bit of a story behind this record. I I've chosen a a record by the Everley brothers, but it's about the sort of I suppose the cross fertilization, the mad uh it's a real world that you get to when you're an arts producer and uh

Alan Yentob18:21

Orson Welles had we just finished a p arena programme about Orson Welles and he'd taken to to ringing me quite regularly'cause he was an insomniac and it didn't matter where in the world he was. Anyway, I was at this time uh in a motel in Kentucky with the Everley brothers who had not been talking to each other for ten years and had just started to talk to each other.

Alan Yentob18:41

We were in a hotel room and Don was playing his records, all the records that Phil hadn't heard and Phil wasn't playing his and Phil was being a bit mopey and then someone walked into the room and said, There's an Awesome Wales on the telephone. So this is a call for me, so I picked up the phone and it was indeed Orson. And he said, Where are you? and I said, Well, I'm in Kentucky with the Everly Brothers. And he said, Who are the Everly brothers? So I tried to explain. He said, Any relation to the Everly sisters?

Alan Yentob19:11

I said, uh who are the Evelyn sisters? He said, Well, they ran a brothel in New Orleans.

Alan Yentob19:17

Anyway, I went back into the room and I saw the

Alan Yentob19:20

Two Lads and I've chosen this song because

Alan Yentob19:23

It's called Let It Be Me. Uh it's just one of many Everly Brothers songs which I love. I love those two voices. So these two rather fatter, stouter men came together again, but I've chosen the thin version of this song, the the one that was in their heyday.

Speaker 419:37

So never leave me lonely.

Speaker 419:42

Tell me you love me all

Speaker 419:48

And let you lower it.

Speaker 419:53

Uh

Presenter19:53

BAE

Presenter19:57

The Everley Brothers and Let It Be Me, the subject of one of my castaway Alan Yentob's arena programmes, as was David Bowie and the Ford Cortina, you did the private life of it, I remember, and the the Chelsea Hotel in New York, those kinds of subjects. Do you think it was?

Presenter20:12

Easier in those days to get ambitious programmes like that off the ground, much more than it is today.

Alan Yentob20:19

I'm not sure whether it was. Perhaps it was in the sense that you took a small idea.

Alan Yentob20:24

Popular culture, really.

Alan Yentob20:26

and in a sense sort of blew it up and extended it. And um

Alan Yentob20:31

I don't think there are necessarily the opportunities that there used to be for that. But I think there's I I'm not one of these who buys, oh, television in the good old days was so much better than television today. I think uh I mean we sounded

Presenter20:42

But didn't you enjoy it more then? Don't you recall those long hours in the cutting room into the wee small hours arguing over a ten second shot with enormous affection?

Alan Yentob20:48

Yeah.

Alan Yentob20:50

Do you wish you were that?

Presenter20:51

Do you wish you were there now?

Alan Yentob20:53

No, I can be I and now I'm spending time doing other things and and not, I assure you, just bureaucratic things. And I mean, I tried still to to spend enough time, you know, enthusing about programmes and and seeing them and talking about them and planning for them. Uh and it's not to say that I I don't see my

Alan Yentob21:11

my career as one endless sort of leap up the BBC ladder or anything. I don't I mean, I'm very happily one day go back to making programs. And look at this industry. Well, when I say making them, being part of them, motivating people.

Presenter21:24

Would you like, though, to be Director General first?

Alan Yentob21:28

No, I have no I didn't if you'd have said to me a few years ago, Do you want to be controller of BBC One? I would have said no, probably. I don't plan ahead in quite that way. My sights are set on doing this really well and an understanding that I'm going to do an interesting job. The next job I do is going to be an interesting one.

Alan Yentob21:44

In a television film, and that will depend what the opportunity is at the time.

Presenter21:48

But you're not ruling out the the top job.

Alan Yentob21:54

Who knows, I have no no idea what will happen, genuinely.

Presenter21:58

More music.

Alan Yentob22:00

My next choice is from A Mind of Winter, which is a a work by George Benjamin, a young contemporary composer, that most difficult of all occupations. The ambition that I think i is in this piece to take the orchestral sounds and to to find the human voice and to to marry the two together is I think terribly interesting. Also the other thing is it's on the desert island and this this song, this piece of music is really about the cold and about the frost and it it's uh based on a poem by Wallace Stevens called The Snowman.

Speaker 422:46

Yeah, what

Speaker 423:08

A bunch is

Presenter23:32

Part of A Mind of Winter, composed and conducted by George Benjamin and sung by Penelope Walmsley Clark with the London Sinfonietta.

Presenter23:40

George Benjamin, who's a friend, Alan, and you mentioned Orson Welles and the Everly Bulls. I mean, these names that that drop fairly regularly from your lips, I know there are stories of you turning up.

Alan Yentob23:48

You're telling me I'm a nameshop?

Presenter23:50

There are these good jokes about you turning up at parties saying this is I've brought my friend Orson, you know, or I brought my friend Mel. I mean, have you made a point of cultivating these people, or do you just have a natural affinity with them?

Alan Yentob24:02

Well, I I don't know if it's quite like that, I sort of um but of course if you have worked in this area for most of your life, you tend to meet people and I have, I suppose, formed with some of those people lifelong friendships.

Presenter24:16

But but it it does make for a glamorous sounding life anyway, just like people believe television executives' lives are and often are not.

Alan Yentob24:21

Uh mm-hmm.

Presenter24:23

On the personal level, um, your life has become rather more conventional of late. You've had um two children in the past years. Jacob you've got, who's four, and Isabella, who's one. A first time father in your mid forties. Has that had a profound effect on you?

Alan Yentob24:38

Yes, I'm afraid the boring answer is it it has a profound effect on me.

Alan Yentob24:42

I've always loved children actually. And being a late father

Alan Yentob24:47

You do I think you do appreciate them perhaps that much more. However b however busy you are when later in in life, somehow or other you know how to find the time for the things that matter and and um you've got to a point in your life where the things that you can delegate, you can delegate. So yes, I absolutely adore being a father, I have to say.

Presenter25:06

Do you think it's altered your professional judgments in any way? I mean, uh one thinks back to Birth Night that you put on on B B C Two. Was that round about the time Jacob was coming or?

Alan Yentob25:12

Sounds good.

Alan Yentob25:16

Well, I must admit it was. That's where we you talk about you're able to indulge yourself on B B C T. Well, to some extent you are. You're able to share your enthusiasms with millions of people. It was a very, very one of those very good nights, that one, I must say, and especially the scenes in the hospital with all the births going on.

Presenter25:29

But does it also make you jump more readily at an idea like Children's Hospital? I mean, suddenly it gives you a new perspective on life and makes you it's really what we were talking about earlier, whether you

Presenter25:40

Are like-minded with the mass audience. Do you feel now that you know a bit more about?

Alan Yentob25:44

I I have to know a bit more about them, but I think I I don't think I'm a different person actually, but I think I'm looking in other directions. Particularly if you're running BBC One, I think to have children, it is a family channel. We want families to watch together.

Presenter25:56

Record number six.

Alan Yentob25:57

Well record number six this is for Jacob and um

Alan Yentob26:01

It's uh Hank Williams, better known to him as Panks Williams, which is how he referred to him. Philippa, his mother, uh much she likes Lefty Frizzell, who's another a rather obscure country blues singer, but rather wonderful. Uh but Hank Panks always wins out, so this is what we play in the car a lot, and Jacob sings along with him. This one is your cheating heart.

Speaker 426:21

You cheating, pard.

Speaker 426:24

We'll make you we

Speaker 426:28

You cry and cry and try to sleep.

Speaker 426:36

But sleep won't come.

Speaker 426:43

You're cheating hard.

Presenter26:47

And Well Hello.

Presenter26:49

Hank Williams and your cheating heart. I like your views, Alan Yentub, on the long term future of the BBC b beyond the charter renewal and beyond the millennium.

Presenter27:00

Isn't it inevitable that as more and more channels, satellite and cable come on stream, that the viewing figures will be more and more eroded and that the licence fee will be less and less justifiable? Aren't we living through the last decade of the BBC as we know it?

Alan Yentob27:16

That's both sort of, I suppose, fair in some ways, in other ways sort of slightly apocalyptic, but

Alan Yentob27:22

We will expect and do expect the share of audience among the terrestrial channels to decline. But the BBC will be.

Alan Yentob27:30

Showing its programmes, I think, on network television for a long time to come. And I think that the picture we'll get of the industry will be on the one hand, you will have networks, which will be important again if that shared experience is to be important to people. If not everybody wants to program their own entertainment, but people will become more and more familiar with computers, telephones, these will lead to people having options. There'll still be a place though for the networks, in my belief.

Presenter27:57

But therefore,

Presenter27:59

But they will therefore use BBC One and BBC two less and less. I mean, can it really go on being a service for everybody funded by a universal license fee? There comes a point when people will say, look, I really don't watch the BBC that often, why on earth should I have this tax imposed upon me?

Alan Yentob28:15

If you looked at the BBC as a subscription, if you like, um then the cost

Presenter28:19

But it isn't voluntary, that's the point.

Alan Yentob28:21

No, that's an issue, and maybe we shall see in due course what happens in relation to it. Those who say it should simply be a tax. I mean, I've always been a believer in the license fee. I wouldn't want to. predict quite what in ten years' time at the end of the charter will happen. However, there's another point really about the future, which is to do with the BBC as a producer of programmes. There's lots and lots of opportunities.

Presenter28:39

There's lots and lots.

Presenter28:41

Mightn't it therefore end up doing what people perceive it as doing well, which is making the programmes that the commercial channels don't want to make, the high quality programmes? It's either that or take advertising, isn't it?

Alan Yentob28:51

It's either

Alan Yentob28:53

No, there are other ways. I mean, advertising is not the only source of income. I mean, as I as you say we say, subscription, certainly just paying for what you get is another. I think the great glory of the BBC is that it is in touch with the mass of the British public.

Presenter29:07

Will it still be intentional?

Alan Yentob29:08

I I believe it can be and will be. It may be that through the networks it's in touch with them in one sense, but there will be other ways in which they get access to BBC programming through as well, where they can make choices of their own, which will supplement what it does.

Presenter29:21

But isn't it possible that you are one of the last, and I mean one of the last of the controllers of BBC One in the sense that we know it today, who, as you said, sit there in a very privileged position, able to put on the air what you feel is right? I mean you work hard at it and it's not easy, as we've said, and everybody thinks they can do it better than you, but it's a great job. Aren't you one of the last people who's going to have that kind of power? And it is a power.

Alan Yentob29:48

Well, I doubt it actually. You still need people who can motivate uh talent, give them opportunities, go with a hunch even. Uh I mean all those things are part of what makes it an exciting and vibrant place to be. And I I think that uh who whatever television is like and uh it will need impresarios to do that.

Presenter30:11

Record number seven.

Alan Yentob30:13

Well this is just a beautiful aria really from uh Cosi Fantutti, Suabe Sia Ilvento. And this is about when the two lads are about to go off to sea, so they say. This is a song before they depart, the two girls and Don Alfonso.

Speaker 430:47

Oh pray.

Speaker 430:50

God's real hope.

Presenter31:22

The trio Suave Silvento from Mozart's Cosifantute, sung by Margaret Marshall, Jose Van Damme, and Agnes Balza, with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Ricardo Mutti.

Presenter31:33

Time and enough to ponder all these things, your own future and that of the B B C, Alan, on this desert island. I suspect you will very quickly become deeply bored, won't you?

Alan Yentob31:44

Yes, I worry about that as I do, worry about it.

Presenter31:47

No telephone.

Alan Yentob31:48

I gather I'm not allowed a mobile phone while I

Presenter31:50

Certainly not.

Alan Yentob31:52

I kinda can't imagine why not, but perhaps that's a good discipline.

Presenter31:56

But does what we're saying about getting bored mean that you're actually not very happy in your own company? You need people?

Alan Yentob32:02

If there are tasks to be done and things to do, then I would happily want to do them. And I I'm not sort of much of an adventurer in terms of physical life adventures, so I think I would be doing a lot of cooking. And I suspect I'm going to have to resort to introspection.

Alan Yentob32:15

But I think I will have to make some capital out of that introspection one way or another. So I think that my luxury is going to be a a video recorder. Now I know that sounds very banal and very professional, but you say I'm going to send a video direct. It's going to be my

Presenter32:24

I know that's a

Alan Yentob32:29

Equivalent to Alastair Cook's letter from America. And for nostalgia's sake, I'm going to p send my little video. It's going to be one of those small ones in a bottle, rather like that arena bottle that floats out to sea and it's going to come back.

Alan Yentob32:41

The next day, and I'm going to think how well it's going down, how good the ratings are, without necessarily knowing, but I'm going to be very optimistic about it.

Presenter32:47

Last record.

Alan Yentob32:48

My last stroke was just a very sublime and uh

Alan Yentob32:51

Beautiful song sung by a very sublime and beautiful voice, the voice of Jesse Norman. It's uh one of Strauss's four last songs.

Alan Yentob33:00

Beimschlafengen is called.

Speaker 433:44

Peace for

Presenter33:49

Bang Schlaffengen, one of Strauss's four last songs, sung by Jesse Norman with the Gewanthaus Orchestra of Leipzig, conducted by Kurt Mazur. If you could only take one of those records, Helen.

Alan Yentob34:01

I think actually I'd take the Jesse Norman.

Presenter34:04

Send you to sleep.

Alan Yentob34:06

Yes, well I'm gonna have to do a lot of that I think.

Presenter34:08

Feed your soul.

Presenter34:09

You've told you've told us your luxury. What about your book?

Alan Yentob34:13

Well, this is a tricky one. I mean, I thought that the book that would give me some strength and initiative perhaps which I'm going to need to be philosophical and cope with all this is uh it was Condide by Voltaire. You know, that philosopher Ponglos is always going, You live in the best of all possible worlds and well, it's patently obvious that you don't.

Alan Yentob34:31

And then ending up cultivating the garden. But it's a very thin book. And I feel, you know, but somehow my spine mentality will not.

Presenter34:36

You want your mother's wife.

Alan Yentob34:39

Well not justified. So I've often dipped into Montaigne's essays but never quite sort of had the time or perhaps even the inclusion, but I've always admired them and the th the thoughts and I thought to myself well this will give me succour and food that may make me a much better person, may make me put up with and appreciate the things around me. So I'm I'm going to take Montaigne's essays with me.

Presenter35:00

And we shall know if it's worked when we receive the first video diary, Alanyan Tob a Changed Man.

Presenter35:06

Alaniento, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Yeah.

Speaker 335:18

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.