The BBC, a class apart
IN OCTOBER ALAN YENTOB AND CAMILA Batmanghelidjh appeared in court at the beginning of a nine-week hearing following the collapse of her charity Kids Company, of which he was chairman. Six years earlier the pair were seated together in a setting suited to the excesses that led the charity to insolvency. It was a black-tie dinner at a Mayfair hotel where select guests paid tribute to a figure as synonymous with the BBC as Eric Gill’s Ariel and Carole the Test Card girl: Yentob.
The event was organised by the Media Society and overseen by its president, Peter York. One speaker joked of the millions Nigella Lawson had made since Yentob put her on screen. Another claimed the Daily Mail harangued Yentob because he continued to produce radical films (he’d recently interviewed Bette Midler). Some referred wryly to Judaism; many namechecked Oxbridge. Yentob, they said, the ultimate BBC insider, was once an outsider, being the one intern that wasn’t an Oxbridge graduate when beginning his BBC career in 1968. This, they proclaimed, said much about the man: the Great Panjandrum. But what did it say about the BBC?
When Greg Dyke described the BBC as “hideously white” during his brief stint as director-general in the early 2000s, it started a trend for similar generalisations about the corporation that were just as disingenuous. If the staff were defined by race they were also defined by class. The percentage of ethnic minorities working within the
