Bring Me The Head of BBC1

I’ve got a piece in the latest issue of Doctor Who magazine, which came out last week – a write-up of an interview which I actually conducted six years ago. I’m glad I’ve finally been able to bring more of it to print than has been the case before, and I wanted to write a bit here about the interview and, particularly, its subject.
 
I’m not sure when I would have first heard of Alan Yentob. I was interested from a young age in the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the television industry, particularly at the BBC. And of course, especially so when it was anything related to Doctor Who. So I suspect it may well have been his teasing little cameo at the end of the Doctor Who anniversary documentary 30 Years in the TARDIS on BBC1 in November 1993, when I was nine years old, although I can’t say for sure.
 
But certainly from that point he was someone I was aware of and, in that strange way that you can form a view of someone that you don’t know at all, he was someone who I ‘liked’. Especially as I grew older and moved from my childhood and into my teens, where that interest in television history started to combine with views – let’s face it, usually naïve and pretentious ones – about how it was made in the present.
 
Yentob, from what I could tell from a distance, seemed like one of the ‘good guys’; a kind of tie to an old-fashioned version of the BBC despite being dressed in a smart nineties suit. Someone who had the sense of being a creative person, a programme-maker at heart, in a rather bleak-seeming modern broadcasting world of business units and management consultants. I remember being disappointed when he didn’t get the Director-General job in 1999.
 
But Yentob did, of course, remain an important figure at the BBC; both under Dyke and for several years beyond. His career as a staff member at the BBC had an incredible span, from the late 1960s into the 2010s, and he was still going into the 2020s as a freelance presenter rather than an executive. Half a century and more, a BBC man all the way through, from trainee up to the most senior ranks, as the Corporation changed almost entirely all around him.
 
When I was working on my book which eventually became The Long Game, I knew that he was someone who had been involved in both ends of the story I was telling – the journey of Doctor Who from the aftermath of the 1996 TV Movie to its recommission as a BBC series in 2003. So I also knew that he was someone to whom I wanted to speak, to get both his specific insights on those two events and his more general recollections of the BBC at the turn of the century; the latter of which subject forms the key background and context of the book.
 
But how to contact him, when I was an absolute nobody and a nothing who didn’t know anybody who might know him?
 
I tried a standard-format BBC email address construction, of course. Even though he was no longer staff by this stage – I was approaching most of my interviewees in spring of 2020 – because he still presented Imagine… I thought he might have a BBC address still, and the email did go through – although possibly it disappeared into the ether. I looked at the credits on the most recent Imagine… episodes, picked a likely candidate, guessed another BBC email address formation and asked one of the producers if she might pass on the request for me – which, slightly surprisingly, she agreed to do.

 

It felt unlikely any of this would get me anywhere. But then, suddenly, on May 12 2020, a month after I had first tried contacting him… this:
 
Hello Paul
Apologies for what i  now discover has been a marathon attempt to get in touch . Although this email address is still intact , I rarely access it because it is overwhelmed with unsolicited commercial material .
Re Doctor Who ...
I am happy to have a phone conversation but as you know Jane Tranter and  Russell Davies are the principle movers and shakers in its revival .
Despite the Lockdown , i am very busy over the next ten days but should be free to speak soon after .
i can’t promise that i can answer all your questions , but why don’t you send me a rough outline of what you would like to cover. As i have now tracked your emails you can continue to use this address and i will make sure to look out for them .
Best wishes
Alan
 
Blimey. Actual, real-life, Alan Yentob was prepared to speak to me, someone with at the time next to no track record other than a handful of articles for Doctor Who Magazine.
 
We arranged for a phone interview at the end of the month. This being May 2020, it was deep into lockdown at the time, but I was still going into work rather than having to do everything from home. I arranged to take my lunch break at the time he said he’d call, and commandeered the meeting room, which was obviously not often being used at that point, and sat there nervously at the big board room-style table; phone resting ready to put on loudspeaker, and digital recorder running to capture the conversation.
 
(Yes, I work at a radio station, and yes, I could have arranged to do it properly through one of the studios, but it wouldn’t have been right – this wasn’t a work project, this was an entirely outside thing, so it was important to do it on my own time with my own resources).
 
We ended up chatting for half an hour, about Doctor Who, the fraught state of the late 1990s BBC drama department, the granular details of early 2000s commissioning processes, and the intricacies of relationships between production, broadcasting, BBC Films and BBC Worldwide. I thought it was interesting that he was aware – although he had said this before, I think in the Seven-Year Hitch documentary about the TV Movie – that he had been regarded by Doctor Who fans in the nineties as someone who was on the side of the angels as far as the show was concerned.
 
But the bit of the interview which most sticks in my mind is when he asked me how many episodes of Doctor Who there had been, first time around. I was taken a bit off-guard by this and suddenly doubted myself about the precise figure, so I approximated it to over six hundred – which prompted a pause, and then a slightly incredulous:
 
“Are you serious!?”

 

I also remember it wasn’t the easiest of interviews. Not because he wasn’t forthcoming or polite, but because he had clearly spoken about Doctor Who so often before that he had certain mentally-prepared answers, and initially was replying with these composed thoughts rather than answering the actual questions I’d asked. It was one of those interviews where it’s a bit like the old turning-an-oil-tanker metaphor; you had to gradually bring the conversation around to what you actually wanted to discuss. But certainly when we got to those specific areas he wasn’t evasive about any of it.
 
I was incredibly fortunate with The Long Game that despite these people knowing nothing about me at all, and that I could have been a mad fan with a crayon for all they knew, I was able to speak to almost everyone I wanted to for the book. Everyone I got was a punch-the-air moment, but Yentob was definitely one of the special ones.
 
But it was only when his death was announced a year ago, in May 2025 five years on from our interview, that I realised just how important to that book Alan Yentob actually was. And is. He’s someone most of those with an interest in the subject will have heard of, and have some awareness of what a major figure he was in the BBC at that time. And because of the narrative of the book he’s the first interviewee, quoted on the second page – so it almost immediately gives the reader, hopefully, the realisation that this is a proper, serious book. It’s got Alan Yentob in it.
 
As with any interview of this type, especially for a book, there were only certain bits and pieces which I ended up using; there was a quite a lot which was interesting, but not strictly relevant for The Long Game. Earlier this year, I realised that with the 30^th anniversary of the TV Movie coming up, a production with which Yentob was of course very much involved with the path to the screen of, Doctor Who Magazine might be interested in a full version of the interview.
 
The editor Jason liked the idea, and it’s out there on the newsstands now. It even gets one of the cover lines. I think the young me of thirty-odd years ago would have felt very pleased and proud of himself – and the middle-aged me feels pretty happy about it, too.