Melvyn Bragg expected to stay with Sky Arts for two more years (original) (raw)

Melvyn Bragg is expecting to sign a further two-year deal with Sky Arts to present more series of The South Bank Show and other programming.

However, Sky Arts viewers may have to wait some time to see any of Bragg's old ITV South Bank Shows on the channel, with rights issues holding up any deal for archive content.

The broadcaster and Labour peer revealed on Monday that he was in the middle of discussing the deal, which he said could lead to an expansion of his role at the arts broadcaster which he joined after ITV announced it was axing The South Bank Show after more than 30 years, in 2009.

Speaking at a lunch to launch the second six-part series of The South Bank Show on Sky Arts, Bragg said his plans with the broadcaster were "very ambitious" adding that he had "never signed a contract longer than two years in my life".

"It is nice to have a two-year contract," he said, adding that Sky was now "becoming a major spectrum broadcaster".

He said he wanted the relationship to "grow", adding that when he first signed the deal, initially to bring The South Bank Show Awards to Sky Arts, he and the channel "could have got a hiding" from the critics but that it was a success.

He claimed the budgets for The South Bank Show Sky Arts Awards and for the individual films were "as near as dammit" equivalent to the budgets offered by ITV.

The new series will feature films based on arts luminaries ranging from playwright David Hare, dancer Tamara Rojo and singer Alfie Boe. The first programme, about comedian and songwriter Tim Minchin, airs on 18 April.

"We are used to making arts programmes on tight budgets," Bragg said.

Sky Arts channel director James Hunt told MediaGuardian that he harboured hopes of one day striking a deal for the ITV The South Bank Show archives, but that a complicated set of rights issues was currently preventing this. Bragg launched The South Bank Show on ITV in 1978, and it ran on the network for 800 episodes until December 2009.

Hunt revealed that Mariella's Book Show, fronted by Mariella Frostrup, would be cut from 20 episodes a year to eight episodes a year.

"The channel grows in different ways," he said. "When we started it was one of two shows we made ourselves – and now there are twenty."

He said Frostrup was being commissioned to make a new series called Objects of Desire about "cult objects and what makes people covet them".

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