End of an Era…

January 2026

Two men who meant a lot to me died this year – Alan Yentob and Tom Stoppard. I have made more than 25 films with Alan, mainly for the BBC arts series Imagine – here we are in Istanbul, while making a film about the Nobel prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk.

Filming at Topkapi

And here in New Mexico, making a film I really love about Georgia O’Keeffe

Alan looking at Georgia O’Keefe 

Me at White Place

He wasn’t always the easiest person to work with – he had a tendency to order ‘Get that!’ when as director, with a great cameraman, you had already got it, or were planning to get it when you’d completed the shot you were currently on. But luckily Alan and I had similar instincts about what shots and words we needed to get, and as time passed he bossed me about less and less as he realised that I wouldn’t stand for it and anyway it was unnecessary. We both sought for a ‘lift’ above the banal in the films that we did together – a sense of wonder, you could say. And his enthusiasm was infectious.

My first film as producer/director with him as presenter/series editor was Sweet Home New Orleans, made straight after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and our last was this one, on Tom Stoppard, made during Covid in 2021.

It has just been repeated in Tom’s honour and I was glad to see it was still Pick of the Day. He – and the film – deserved it.

Because of Covid – and also, to be honest, because of Tom’s reluctance to be filmed – we shot him mostly at his home in Dorset. He certainly didn’t want to waste his time going out on any trips down memory lanes for our benefit. But what rich pickings there were as he guided us round his house, showing us his books, his paintings and family photographs, all unleashing floods of thoughts and stories.

Alan photographing tortoise

I hired a tortoise to wander round Tom’s garden, rather as one wanders through Arcadia, my favourite of his plays. I first saw Arcadia in London when I was 40 and am going to see it again very soon with my daughter, now not so far off 40 herself. I don’t know if it’s homage or coincidence that so many of Tom’s plays are currently in revival, but it’s a pleasure and a consolation that they are.

C Jill Nicholls