British television history is littered with examples of outstanding program makers who have been promoted to executive positions that have been less suited to their talents. Nobody personifies this trend more than Alan Yentob, although, unlike David Attenborough and others, he did not quickly abandon this career path in favor of a return to direct program making.

     Yentob's television career has been entirely at the BBC, which he joined in 1968 as a general trainee, the way into the industry taken by many talented personalities. His main interests were in the field of the arts, and he quickly established himself as a director and producer of arts programming in the early 1970s, concentrating on popular culture and the avant-garde rather than the more traditional approach. The program that most clearly defined his style was "Cracked Actor: A Film About David Bowie," which Yentob produced and directed for the mainstream arts series Omnibus in 1975. This was the first time a traditional arts program had tackled a rock musician as a subject, though Bowie was the perfect artist to demonstrate the validity of the approach. Yentob found himself very much at home in the company of creative artists. His ability to share and develop their vision of how they should be presented on television was to produce many valuable collaborative partnerships. Bowie became a subject to whom Yentob would return throughout his career.

     Yentob's next main move was to the program with which he is most associated: BBC 2's Arena. Originally split into strands on cinema, theater, and art and design, Arena became a byword for innovation and provocation under Yentob's direction. Though he was series editor from 1978 to 1985, he was also a highly active producer, director, and interviewer for the program, which became a home for those interested in the serious analysis of popular culture, cinema, and music, as well as for the presentation of the avant-garde and for the sort of quirky concept programs that themselves aspired to be works of art. Typical of the postmodernist investigations of everyday art was "The Private Life of the Ford Cortina" ( 1982), examining the impact of a particular make of car on British cultural life. Yentob himself produced another program that typified the program's style: "My Way" (1979), which presented and analyzed different interpretations of the famous Frank Sinatra song. Musicians profiled included Lene Lovich, Dire Straits, the Everly Brothers, and Jerry Lee Lewis, while the cinema was represented by the likes of Marcel Came, Mel Brooks, and Luis Bui'iuel, theater by Robert Wilson and Joe Orton, and literature by Milan Kundera and Kurt Vonnegut, among many others.

     Yentob continued to use his rapport with artists to­ ward program-making ends, persuading Orson Welles to give a career-summarizing interview, which he produced as a three-part special in 1982, and exploring the television work of Dennis Potter in another memorable Arena interview conducted by himself. Talented arts program makers who flourished under Yentob's regime included Nigel Finch, Leslie Megahey, and Anthony Wall. Arena won six British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards under Yentob's editorship. The next step up the ladder for Alan Yentob was a promotion to head of music and arts at BBC Television, a post he held from 1985 to  1988. Though  the main thrust of the job was directing the work of others, Yentob did not entirely withdraw from the program development process in this period, conducting the Den­nis Potter interview mentioned earlier and also interviewing Arthur Miller for Omnibus. Indeed, Yen­tob was very much at home in this job, and he was the obvious choice in  1988  for  the  controllership of  BBC 2, the BBC's more serious-minded television channel.

     One of Yentob's first acts as channel controller was to set a regular end to each weekday  evening on BBC 2. The highly influential daily current-affairs program Newsnight was for the first time given a regular 10:30 start time (where it can still be found), and it was followed every day from 11:15 to midnight (or beyond) by an innovative arts, discussion, and review program, The Late Show, edited by Michael Jackson, who was later to follow in Yentob's footsteps as BBC 2 controller.

     Among Yentob's most  successful  commissions  for BBC 2 were the topical news quiz show Have I Got News for You and the innovative comedy Absolutely Fabulous, both of which later transferred to BBC 1, as did Yentob himself, becoming controller of the BBC's mainstream television channel in  1993.  Never  a  populist, this was not really the right job for him, and his years in charge of BBC 1 and thereafter as BBC director of television (1996) and director of drama, entertainment, and children's television (2000) showed that the BBC did not really know what to do with one of its greatest talents. Many were reported to be frustrated by his lack of decisiveness, and although ultimately considered for the top job of BBC director-general, his further elevation was never really likely.

     In the meantime, he maintained his links with the world of the arts through a series of cultural directorships, including chairing the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The BBC, however, came under fire for a serious decline in this area and was accused of  "dumbing down" its arts coverage. To counter that, in 2003 Alan Yentob returned to program making, first as the writer and presenter of a three-part series on Leonardo da Vinci, and then as editor and presenter of a new mainstream arts series, Imagine ... , on BBC 1.