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…