Here's a poseur for you

Alan Yentob, inspired by the artwork Self Portrait with Fried Eggs (1996 by Sarah Lucas)
The Weekender

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Whenever the quality of British television gets me down, I take a sniff or two of Dab It Off and try to imagine a parallel universe, similar to our own, but with strange and subtle differences. On that planet (let's call it Gribble), British tennis players routinely triumph at Wimbledon, British Eurovision performers sing in tune, and the National Lottery raises money for bad causes (such as saving the polio germ from extinction), while its Cancer Scratchcards give the winners a brief carcinogenic burst of Strontium 90.

Instead of car lights, Gribillians have car darks on their vehicles, and if they carelessly leave them on when they park, the whole street is plunged into pitch-blackness. As for their television, GBC1 values the arts and believes that even trivial subjects should be treated seriously, unlike our own BBC1, which despises the arts, and treats even serious subjects trivially.

I used to think that Alan Yentob was a secret Gribillian, partly because he looks like a visitor from another planet, but also because he appeared to share GBC1's broadcasting values. Although he was a senior BBC executive, he claimed to value programme quality above mere ratings, but my illusions were shattered in the mid-1990s, on the day he declared that "Noel's House Party is the most important show the BBC has", thereby revealing himself to be an Earthling after all.

Since then, he's acquiesced in the demise of serious arts programming on BBC1, a disgraceful state of affairs which Imagine ... will do little to rectify, because last night's debut edition was preoccupied with grabbing an audience, rather than with telling us anything about art. And worse, executive producer Alan Yentob had looked far and wide for a knowledgeable and charismatic presenter and come up with ... Alan Yentob, a man with the perfect face for radio, and an ability to suck so much oxygen out of a room that he could get a job in the circus as The Human Bell Jar.

"There's no way I'm going to be dumbing down," Yentob vowed in the pre-publicity for this series. "I'm expecting an intelligent audience." So in that case, why did he begin his look at The Saatchi Phenomenon with several minutes of tits and bums, tangled triangles and tummy bananas, using the fig-leaf excuse of filming the Saatchi Gallery's launch party to cover a naked desire to grab the attention of the plebs? Furthermore, why did he claim that Charles Saatchi "never gives interviews, never has", when I recently read an extensive interview that the Iraqi-born art collector gave to Deborah Solomon of The New York Times? Together with claims that Saatchi is a virtual recluse who's almost never been photographed before (even though we've all seen photos of Nigella Lawson parading him around in a "this is my billionaire partner" sort of way), it seems that the greatest piece of creative work on display last night was the way some prosaic footage shot in County Hall was being tarted up as a BBC exclusive.

As for the exhibits and the artists themselves, I haven't seen such a bunch of poseurs and flâšneurs since I last watched Galton and Simpson's brilliant modern-art spoof, The Rebel. It's well-known that Saatchi can make or break a young artist's career with one blow of his chequebook, so what else could the likes of Tracey Emin or Martin Maloney say except: "I like his voice," or "He's very nice" - and when another dared to criticise his patron by saying: "He's got a good serve but no game," he quickly added: "I shouldn't have said that." An advertising man did gently accuse him of hypocrisy for having run anti-smoking campaigns before taking on the Silk Cut account, but such minor criticisms were lost amid a welter of uncritical adulation. And given the programme's use of hackneyed Koyaanisqatsimeets-Benny-Hill speeded-up visual effects (the man standing still as commuters rush by belongs to the Eighties, as do Yentob's suits), the entire documentary deserved to be immersed in the tank of formaldehyde that was housing Damien Hirst's shark.

THE time I last met Alan Yentob, he told me: "I agree with 99 per cent of what you write about the arts on TV." So there's a 99 per cent chance that he'll agree with me when I say that Imagine ... is a pile of cynically-motivated, ratingsobsessed garbage that makes even The South Bank Show look like Huw Wheldon's Monitor in comparison, and that Yentob is destined to retire from the BBC without ever making it to DG, whereupon the Saatchis and the Rogers will no longer invite him to dinner, and (like most TV executives who've lost their power) he will fall into a rapid decline. Still, perhaps he'll invest in some digital equipment that will enable him to pick up GBC1, where the arts programmes aren't tokenist, but treat their subjects with integrity, and keep their critical faculties intact. Some GBC1 programmes are already being retransmitted here on earth, by the way, on BBC4, which unfortunately means that half the population are unable to see what an arts programme can look like when it's been made by people with a passion for their subject, and without one eye stuck firmly on the ratings. Shame on you Yentob. Gribillians everywhere were counting on you.

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