Secret of Yentob’s chat for ‘British Backscratching Corporation’
ALaN YENTOB stepped down as the bb C’s creative director in 2015, over allegations that he’d tried to influence its coverage of troubled charity Kids Company, where he was chairman of trustees.
So viewers may have been surprised to see him reporting on BBC1’s News at Ten this week.
Yentob, 74, was handed an extended item on Monday, interviewing the american comedian Mel brooks about his new autobiography.
Viewers may be even more surprised to learn that Yentob is a close friend of brooks, who is the godfather of his son Jacob, 30.
‘This is the british backscratching Corporation at its worst,’ a source tells me. ‘Viewers should have been told of Yentob’s close connection to his subject.’ They question why, if bosses deemed the publication of brooks’s memoir to be newsworthy, he wasn’t interviewed by one of the BBC’s many U.S. correspondents.
‘and if it was considered a job so important that someone had to be flown out at great expense some 5,000 miles from London, surely the interview should have been conducted by one of the arts correspondents?’
Yentob — who was still getting paid as much as £249,999 per year by the BBC for his arts show, Imagine, in 2018 — perhaps demonstrates that ‘star’ power still holds sway at the Corporation.
Last week, bosses were criticised for allowing amol Rajan to front a controversial bbC2 documentary on the Royal Family, The Princes and The Press, despite the presenter being a self-declared republican who had previously called the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s public roles a ‘total fraud’ and joked about how he wanted to hurl bricks at them.
Yentob, who has been working for the BBC since joining as a trainee in 1968, became one of the best connected and most powerful figures at the BBC.
he was described by his friend Tony hall, the BBC’s previous director general, as the conscience of the broadcaster.