It's that quite delicious school of Brit character acting, whereby villains actually become rather sexy – see anything Alan Rickman does, plus Antony Hopkins in [iSilence[/i etc. From a non-Brit perspective, Al Pacino has it too.

I first saw Irons on stage at the RSC doing Richard II – I remember finding the character so utterly wimpy and this is so different.

Yentob's having a right lark at the BBC's expense lately, isn't he?

Not bad for someone who was disciplined over faking his involvement in interviews on Imagine.

They have had a plan to do the same in Birmingham for some years now and they have a similar plethora of now disused viaducts entering the city from all directions which nature has been left to reclaim - local residents in Deritend (for instance) have campaigned for a long time to be allowed up onto one disused viaduct in their district to reclaim it and allotment-ize it, to no avail at the moment, in the meantime nature is continuing with its job anyway and some decent sized young trees can now be seen on some of the raised railways

He's had a long career based on appearing to be the thoughtful man with his finger on the cultural pulse but, in truth, just sucking-up to whoever is the current hot-property, getting his own name up-front as the discoverer.
Don't know if you've ever read [i2 1/2 Men in a Boat [/i by Nigel Williams?
Yentob (although not named IIRC) was supposed to be the third man in the boat, following Jerome K Jerome's trip up-river, but they had to set off without him and even when he did eventually turn up he was on the phone all the time or asking his fellow boatees which way they thought was best to lean/jump these days ... an opportunist if ever there was one.
A non-renaissance, shallower version of Melvyn Bragg.

Seems to be doing a lot of programmes about architecture recently. I caught an oldish prog about Rogers last week and this week he was talking about Zaha Hadid. One thing I did notice is that he and architects talk a lot of guff.