Visionary

“As a younger coach, I really admired the teams he built at Chelsea, in particular.

“He is definitely a visionary – someone that broke the mould in terms of how you manage in different ways to do things, and then following his success through different clubs, leagues. Incredible, really, what he’s achieved in his career.

“It’s always a great opportunity for any club to go up against one of his teams. I’m looking forward to the challenge immensely and I think it’s going to be a great game.”

Mourinho considers himself “a little Magpie” on account of his bond with former Newcastle manager Sir Bobby Robson.

The Portuguese shadowed Sir Bobby at Sporting Lisbon, Porto and Barcelona as an interpreter and assistant in the 1990s.

Mourinho has spoken glowingly about Newcastle over the years and said he “loved” the club before this game.

“I have heard Jose’s words about Newcastle and I absolutely echo them myself,” Howe said.

“They are great words about Sir Bobby and the role he played in his career. That’s really nice to hear, but the line stops tomorrow.

“When the game kicks off, we want to win. We are desperate for the points. It will be a competitive game between two great clubs.”

Newcastle lost 2-1 to Brighton in the Premier League on Saturday and will run a late check on influential midfielder Sandro Tonali, who is suffering from illness.

“We will give him every opportunity,” Howe said. “He wasn’t there at training today and he’s such an important player, so we will use all the hours we have.”

Robert Wilson, a leader in avant-garde theater who collaborated with Philip Glass, David Byrne and Lady Gaga over his six-decade career, has died. He was 83.

The “Einstein on the Beach” director died Thursday at his home in Water Mill, N.Y., after a “brief but acute illness,” according to his website.

“While facing his diagnosis with clear eyes and determination, he still felt compelled to keep working and creating right up until the very end,” the statement reads. “His works for the stage, on paper, sculptures and video portraits, as well as the Watermill Center, will endure as Robert Wilson’s artistic legacy.”

Wilson was born on Oct. 4, 1941, in Waco, Texas, to a conservative Southern Baptist family. He struggled with a speech impediment and learning disabilities as a child but was aided by his ballet teacher, Byrd Hoffman.

“She heard me stutter, and she told me, ‘You should take more time to speak. You should speak slowly,’ ” he told the Observer in 2015. “She said one word over a long period of time. She said go home and try it. I did. Within six weeks, I had overcome the stuttering.”

In 1968, Wilson opened an experimental theater workshop named after his mentor: the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. He created the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation in 1969, under which he established the Watermill Center in 1992.

In his early 20s, Wilson moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he studied interior design and architecture at the Pratt Institute. Later, he joined the recreation department of Goldwater Memorial Hospital, where he brought dance to catatonic polio patients with iron lungs.

“Because the patients were largely paralyzed, the work he was doing with them was more mental than physical,” wrote his former colleague Robyn Brentano in Frieze. “With his unconventional frankness and tenderness, he drew out people’s hidden qualities.”

Wilson started teaching movement classes in Summit, N.J., while he wrote his early plays. One day in 1968, he witnessed a white police officer about to strike a deaf, mute Black boy, Raymond Andrews, while walking down the street. Wilson came to Andrews’ defense, appeared in court on his behalf and eventually adopted him. Together, Andrews and Wilson created “Deafman Glance,” a seven-hour “silent opera,” which premiered in 1970 in Iowa City, Iowa.

“The world of a deaf child opened up to us like a wordless mouth. For more than four hours, we went to inhabit this universe where, in the absence of words, of sounds, 60 people had no words except to move,” wrote French Surrealist Louis Aragon after the 1971 Paris premiere. “I never saw anything more beautiful in the world since I was born. Never, never has any play come anywhere near this one, because it is at once life awake and the life of closed eyes, the confusion between everyday life and the life of each night, reality mingles with dream, all that’s inexplicable in the life of deaf man.”

In 1973, Glass attended a showing of Wilson’s “The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,” which ran for 12 hours from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. The two artists, united by their interest in experimenting with time and space in theater, soon teamed up to create “Einstein on the Beach,” which premiered in 1976 in Avignon, France.

“We worked first with the time — four hours — and how we were going to divide it up,” Glass told the Guardian in 2012. “I discovered that Bob thinks with a pencil and paper; everything emerged as drawings. I composed music to these, and then Bob began staging it.”

Times classical music critic Mark Swed called “Einstein” “easily the most important opera of the last half century,” even though “nothing about what composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson put onstage was opera.” Indeed, “Einstein” has become a cult classic despite the fact it has no Einstein, no beach and no narrative.

Wilson and Glass partnered again to create “the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down,” which also featured music from Talking Heads frontman Byrne, for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The project, meant to span 12 hours, was ultimately never completed due to funding problems. In 1995, Wilson shared his concerns about arts funding in the U.S. with The Times.

“The government should assume leadership,” Wilson told Times contributor Jan Breslauer. “By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we’re going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell. We need to have a cultural policy [instead]. There has to be a balance between government and the private sector.

“One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing,” Wilson says. “They are the journal and the diary of our time.”

In addition to his stage work, Wilson created drawings, sculptures, furniture and installations, which he showed at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York beginning in 1975. In 2004, Wilson produced a series of video portraits featuring Brad Pitt, Winona Ryder, Renée Fleming and Alan Cumming. He would return to the medium again in 2013 with Lady Gaga as his subject.

His work on the installation “Memory/Loss” earned him a Golden Lion for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1993.

One of Wilson’s last projects was an installation commissioned by Salone del Mobile in April Centering on Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà at Milan’s Castello Sforzesco, the project explored the Virgin Mary’s pain following Christ’s death with a combination of music, light and sculpture.

“I’m creating my own vision of the artist’s unfinished masterpiece, torn between a feeling of reverential awe and profound admiration,” he told Wallpaper.

Wilson is survived by Andrews; his sister, Suzanne; and his niece, Lori Lambert.

The death of Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson is an immeasurable loss for music and for California, both the place and the dream of it that Wilson conjured with his regal and tender compositions.

Wilson was the visionary of the defining American rock band, one who competed with the Beatles to move pop music into new realms of sophistication and invention, while writing songs capturing the longing of an ascendant youth culture.

His death leaves only two surviving members of the original lineup — Mike Love and Al Jardine, Wilson’s high school friend who sang lead on early hits like “Help Me Rhonda” and wrote songs for beloved later-period albums like “Surf’s Up” and “Sunflower.”

On the day the world learned of Wilson’s death, Jardine briefly spoke to The Times to remember his lifelong friend and bandmate. The guitarist, vocalist and songwriter — now on tour with his Pet Sounds Band playing Beach Boys hits with a focus on their 1970s output — looked back on six decades of writing and performing with one of the greatest minds of popular music.

Jardine’s conversation was edited for length and clarity.

I just lost my best friend and mentor. It’s not a good feeling, but I’m going to carry on and continue to play our music and perform with the Pet Sounds Band.

Brian was a great friend. We grew up together, we went to high school together. We were both dropouts, which is not a bad thing as long as you have a vision of the future. His and mine was to make music.

We were very good friends and very successful in part because of his great talent. He had an amazing ability to compose, very simple things and very complex things, all at the same time. He was a visionary.

We all grew up together musically, but he grew exponentially. He became a leader, and formed new ways of chord construction, things no one had heard before, and we rose to the challenge with him.

It’s been said that Brian invented the state of California, the state of mind. That’s a cute way of saying it, but he really invented a new form of music in the ’60s and ’70s. It was very sophisticated, but went way beyond that. He was a humble giant, a great American composer.

I don’t think anyone else could walk in his shoes, given all that he went through. I did write some songs he liked, and did help him get through treacherous times. It must be so frightening to be left in the wilderness by yourself and not know how to get home. He said one song I wrote helped him get through that, which is quite a compliment from the great Brian Wilson, who had his own demons to deal with.

Brian Wilson’s band was a reawakening of his professional life. He never enjoyed touring, so this band was a whole new life for him, to experience his own music and an adulation that he never had before.

The Beach Boys — Dennis Wilson, left, Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, Brian Wilson, Mike Love — perform circa 1964 in California.

(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

His legacy is of course in the music, and any interpreter of that legacy has to be sharp and devoted to it. We have the most devoted people that could be there to do that, so many original members of his band. My son Matthew, he’s Brian’s voice, and the DNA is there. With his arranger, Darian, arranging all vocals, we have all the muscle and genius to pull it off.

When Carl Wilson and I were singing those parts back then, we’d abbreviate things — you can’t do everything you did in the studio with only five of us. Now we’ve got 10 people onstage and I just heard some background parts yesterday that sounded just like we used to — you can hear Carl and Dennis in there.

When we take the band out, I have a little white piano onstage, like the one he played in the past. It’s a symbolic moment, the empty piano.

While the Beach Boys tour was a hit-based performance, with this iteration, we’re more introspective, deeper cuts, performing much of the 1970s catalog. There’s quite a few numbers the public hasn’t heard, exploring the heart and soul of those albums. I was hoping Brian would have been able to join us.

But it’s wonderful, we’re hoping this music should last forever, and be felt at the deep levels that Brian experienced it.

It sure is a great responsibility to play it, but it just feels natural to me. I’ve been doing it for so long, It doesn’t feel weighty. I’m confident, especially with this band being so remarkable. I’m still learning from Brian after all these years.

Following the death of legendary BBC executive Alan Yentob, the Mirror’s Jessica Boulton looks back on the life and career of a daring outsider remembered as a ‘cultural visionary’

It was 1968 when a 21-year-old Alan Yentob first joined the BBC – the only non-Oxbridge graduate on the trainee scheme that year.

His application had been borderline cocksure, tinged with sarcasm.

Asked about his experience, he had famously replied: “My dramatic debut at the age of nine in The Merry Wives of Windsor was greeted with a gratifying critique: ‘You ought to be a film star, cos you’ve got smashing legs’.”

It was a daring and leftfield response for the then-notoriously-straight-laced Auntie. But it was one that worked.

East Londoner Alan, a Leeds graduate and son of Iraqi Jewish immigrants, turned his back on the family textile business, broke through the cliques of his Oxbridge colleagues and began his mission: to shake up the BBC.

READ MORE: Alan Yentob dead: BBC presenter and executive dies after 40 year career at broadcaster

It was one he would continue for six decades, as he became the man responsible for introducing some of television’s most iconic and groundbreaking shows—from Absolutely Fabulous, Have I Got News For You, Ballykissangel, and the documentary series Imagine to Colin Firth’s Pride and Prejudice and Wallace and Gromit.

He launched the dedicated CBBC and CBeebies channels and (rightly or wrongly) championed a then-unknown Jeremy Clarkson for a little show called…Top Gear.

Now, after his death on Saturday at the age of 78, one word is dominating the tributes: “Visionary.”

His actress wife, Phillipa Walker, mother of his children, Jacob and Isabella, said: “Every day with Alan held the promise of something unexpected. Our life was exciting, he was exciting.

“He was curious, funny, annoying, late and creative in every cell of his body. But more than that, he was the kindest of men and a profoundly moral man. He leaves in his wake a trail of love a mile wide.”

BBC director-general Tim Davie said: “Alan Yentob was a towering figure in British broadcasting and the arts. A creative force and a cultural visionary, he shaped decades of programming at the BBC and beyond. He had a rare gift for identifying talent and lifting others up.”

Among those he elevated was the duo French and Saunders, as Dawn French recognised last night. “We’ve lost a top chap. He was our advocate from the start,” she said on social media.

David Baddiel, who starred in Alan’s series The Art Of Stand-Up, posted a picture of them together. “Here he is backstage after one of my shows, being incredibly supportive, as he always was,” said David. “A lovely man, and a king of TV.”

The Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe were the subject of one of Alan’s Imagine documentaries, which aired last year.

“Alan was a legend in British TV, responsible for some of the BBC’s finest programmes,” the duo said in a joint statement. “He was a stimulating person to spend time with.”

He certainly had some stories to tell.

Alan and his twin brother Robert were born in Stepney, east London, in 1947. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Iraq, who had built up a profitable textile company in the UK. The family spent a few years in Manchester before settling in a flat in London’s prestigious Park Lane. His parents gave the boys the best start possible, sending them to private school.

Alan would go on to graduate from Leeds University with a 2:2 in law but armed with a new passion – for drama. So while his brother went into the family business, Alan joined the BBC and worked his way from the ground up.

It was in 1975 that his talent for interviews and documentaries really emerged. In his now legendary Omnibus episode, Cracked Actor, Alan chronicled the vulnerability of the cocaine-addicted David Bowie in a way that had never been seen.

“He was fragile and exhausted, but also prepared to open up and talk in a way he had never really done before,” Alan once recalled. “Our encounters tended to take place in hotel rooms in the early hours of the morning.”

His work was recognised on both sides of the pond, with US music magazine Rolling Stone calling it the “greatest rockumentary ever”.

After that, Alan’s eye soon caught management’s attention: He became the youngest ever controller of BBC 2 in 1988, followed by BBC One controller in 1993 and then, via other roles, BBC Creative Director in 2004.

His path allowed him a chance to champion many of the standout shows of the past 35 years, including Middlemarch, the 2005 revival of Doctor Who, and Ballykissangel. Perhaps most welcome of all, he was also the man who decided to axe the much-hated soap Eldorado.

Alan was not just in management. He also continued in front of the camera, mainly in his mission to make the arts accessible for all, with his documentaries for Arena and Imagine and The Late Show, a chat show devoted to art and literature. His interviewees included everyone from Billy Connolly and Mel Brooks to Maya Angelou.

Such was his appeal that sometimes it wasn’t clear who should be most grateful for the interview – Alan or his subjects.

Richard Osman once shared this telling anecdote: “Alan Yentob once walked into a TV green room I was in, looked around, then said ‘if you see Jay-Z, tell him Alan was looking for him’.”

It sums up Alan’s status to a tee.

But Alan’s was not a life without scandal. In 2007, Imagine was accused of inserting clips of him nodding into interviews where he hadn’t been present. An investigation later ruled that none of these made it to air.

Alan also faced pressure after buying a £3,381 London to New York business class while filming.

But his biggest controversy, by far, involved the 2015 collapse of Kids Company, the charity of which he was chairman. He was questioned over a £3m government loan that had been issued shortly before it folded and criticised for not properly overseeing its finances.

Alan was then accused of trying to influence the BBC’s coverage of the scandal, claims he strongly denied. But he eventually resigned from his post as Creative Director six months later, only, he said, because the story was becoming “a serious distraction” from the BBC’s other work.

By last year, it was a distant memory as Alan was appointed a CBE in the 2024 New Year Honours List for services to arts and media, before conducting what would be one of his last major interviews – the exclusive with his old friend and Godfather to his children, Sir Salman Rushdie, about his 2022 assasination attempt.

The pair had once arm-wrestled in the BBC satirical comedy W1A.

Rushdie had yet to find the words for what will surely be a very difficult tribute last night.

Yet BBC Radio 4 presenter Amol Rajan gave an unusually candid insight that Alan himself would no doubt have approved of.

Amol said: “He had his foibles and failures, but Alan Yentob was one of the most generous, influential, singular, passionate, supportive, creative and loved men of his generation.

“His shows were always brilliant, often masterpieces, sometimes seminal. That was public Alan. In private, he was magnetic, zealous, and very funny, with a mesmerising voice and mischievous chuckle. He oozed fortitude until the very last.”

Perhaps – at a time when terrestrial TV faces a fight for its survival – there’s one last legacy which Alan leaves the corporation – the drive to keep shaking things up.

Tim Davie added: “To work with Alan was to be inspired and encouraged to think bigger.”

It’s true: the trainee who began with little to boast of but his “smashing legs” could never be accused of thinking small.

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