Alan Yentob tipped for new BBC post

Alan Yentob's assertion of his northern credentials – he recently announced that, contrary to popular belief, he attended Leeds University and not Oxbridge – appears to have paid off. He is now being tipped to become the BBC's ‘director-general of the north’, a position made necessary by the moving of many regular programmes currently made in the south to the north of England and Scotland as part of a plan to devolve the Beeb.

The Daily Mail reports that Yentob, the presenter of the arts series Imagine, who is also the corporation's creative director, could be placed in charge of the removal of several shows to the corporation's new offices in Salford. If that happened, he would have responsibility for BBC sport, children's programming, new media and technology as well as radio station Five Live.

However, any role in the north for Yentob, 61, would be complicated by his opposition to plans to move his own show to Scotland. A senior corporation source told Broadcast magazine: "Yentob has been fighting tooth and nail against this and it looks like he has lost."

As reported here on Thursday, the plans to move programmes to the north has gone down badly with many BBC staffers, with David Dimbleby allegedly threatening to quit as host of BBC1's Question Time if it is moved to Glasgow.