Thank you, Yentob.
Six-ish degrees of honey-yogurty separation concerning a brilliant BBC bloke, who has died at the age of 78.
The Marrakech houseboy in the Morocco episode of Absolutely Fabulous is named Yentob* as a jokey tribute to the BBC’s Middle Eastern executive Alan Yentob, who originally commissioned the programme for BBC2 in 1992.
Moreover, when Yentob was promoted to controller of BBC1 in 1993 he insisted AbFab came with him, thus for 94’s Series 2 Patsy and Eddy were upgraded to prime time on the main channel, mirroring Alan Yentob’s own career trajectory just months earlier.
Later that same year, on 27 September 1994 I met Mr Yentob himself at a War Child exhibition launch in London Fields. Everyone was there, dahling, BIG names: Bowie, Eno, Fripp, McCartney, Kate Bush, The Edge, Nic Roeg, Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni and assorted rum sorts.
In a subsequent interview, Adam told me that Hackney bash was the first time Marco met Bowie. Marco then told me that wasn’t true.
What is certain is that Yentob assured me he’d speak with his successor at BBC2 — a man named Michael Jackson who didn’t dance — about rebroadcasting Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, a BBC2 play with Bowie in the title role as an egocentric performer ruthlessly devoted to his own talent.
They finally got around to doing just that in 2023, almost 30 years later.
Of course, Dame David was the subject of Yentob’s most celebrated documentary, 1975’s Cracked Actor. It’s a film for the Omnibus strand showing the seedy underbelly of life on tour, as the singer is seen, often uncomfortably, in the throes of a cocaine-induced personal and professional crisis in Los Angeles. Curiously, it was the first time the BBC had devoted an entire programme to a mere pop star, and it was rebroadcast in the Imagine… series in 2013.**
Beloved of everyone from Toyah to George Michael, Rolling Stone called Cracked Actor the “greatest rockumentary ever”, while Yentob recently claimed he was planning to release an expanded 50th anniversary edition with various outtakes for Christmas 2025. The presenter reflected on the programme in 2013:
“Bowie had come to America with an extraordinary cast of characters, all of whom he had determined to kill off by the end of the Diamond Dogs tour. I’d caught him at what was an intensely creative time, but it was also physically and emotionally gruelling. Our encounters tended to take place in hotel rooms in the early hours of the morning or in snatched conversations in the back of limousines. He was fragile and exhausted but also prepared to open up and talk in a way he had never really done before.”
Yentob, of Jewish Iraqi ethnicity but born, incongruously, in Stepney, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, just like the narrator in Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s eighties satire Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money).
Fittingly, the last pair of programmes this idiosyncratic impressario broadcast under the imagine… umbrella profiled a pair of British duos turned national institutions: comedy gal pals French & Saunders: Bitchy, Pointed, Bitter in 2023, and Pet Shop Boys: Then And Now in 2024, the latter an excellent exploration coinciding with the PSB’s most recent album Nonetheless.
Thank you, Alan.
Steve Pafford
*Portrayed by comedian John Wells, the camp character of Humphrey is a reference to the leading man in Casablanca, played by Humphrey Bogart. Casablanca takes place in Morocco.
** Yentob interviewed Bowie on two further occasions: as part of a 1986 Omnibus special called Video Jukebox, and again for his 50th birthday specials in 1997, hence the main image
