The Creative Director of the BBC since 2004, Alan Yentob, spent some of the week at the new BBC headquarters in Salford. Is he going to move there? “No, everyone else is but me, but then I move around enough as it is,” he says. He has just finished making a two-parter for BBC One on Tolstoy. He has also been making a programme on an Iraqi artist who is to feature in the Venice Biennale. He will be working all day on his birthday. “I just hope the sun shines.” RGT
Birthdays today
Louise Brough, tennis player, 88; David Cooke, director, British Board of Film Classification, 55; Stephen Deuchar, director, The Art Fund, 54; Peter Eyre, actor, 69; David Gentleman, artist, 81; Jonathan Gestetner, chairman, Marlborough Rare Books, 71; Lord Lawson of Blaby, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1983-89, 79; Timothy Mason, arts and heritage consultant, 66; Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive, News Corporation, 80; Professor Griselda Pollock, cultural historian, 62; Shane Ritchie, actor, 47; Robert Thomson, Publisher, Dow Jones & Co and former Editor of The Times, 50; Patricia Tindale, architect, 85; Frederick Villeneuve Nicolle, plastic surgeon, 80.