Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1995, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a television executive. He comes from a family of Sephardic Iraqi Jews and was brought up in Manchester and London.

He was sent curiously to a cathedral boarding school and after leaving university he joined the BBC and he's been there ever

since. In a career spanning 27 years he's risen steadily through the ranks becoming

the head of music and arts and ending up as the only man to have run both its television channels.

His crumpled suits and unpredictability disguise an orthodox corporate temperament.

He says that at school he was a comfortable outsider, a phrase that could equally apply to his career at the BBC.

He is currently the controller of BBC 1, Alan Yentob.

Does that strike you as fair, Alan.

Do you see yourself as an outsider?

Well, maybe it's a sort of delusion of mine.

If you've been ensconced in the BBC for that many years, perhaps you can't call

yourself an outsider but yes I suppose

coming from an immigrant family a term that my mother still doesn't like me to use

but I find that that kind of otherness you have is something that is valuable.

But also professionally it seems to me you take a pride, don't you, in being unpredictable as I said, in being a bit of a maverick?

Well, that's how my career began as a maverick.

As for the crumpled suits, I remember reading about my wearing al-mani suits some years ago,

15 years ago, before I'd ever know how I didn't know how to spell our money,

let alone, and I thought, well, that's a good idea,

maybe I'll buy one.

...