An eight-week search for the UK and Ireland's best guitarist, a one-off drama about a pregnant man and a Norwegian comedy about a couples counsellor who doesn't believe in relationships will all form part of the new Sky Arts channel when it relaunches next week.
Sky Arts director Phil Edgar-Jones, who was in Ireland last weekend for the Sky Cat Laughs comedy festival in Kilkenny, is overseeing the merger of Sky Arts 1 and 2 into a single channel and a move up the Sky electronic programme guide (EPG) to channel 121.
Reflecting “the way people watch now”, Sky Arts content will also be promoted on Sky’s on-demand service, which is available in Ireland to the 40 per cent of Sky’s estimated 700,000 customer base who have connected boxes.
“To be perfectly frank, there is no point in having two channels,” says Edgar-Jones, while being higher up the EPG means it can “reach more people”.
But the beauty of Sky Arts is that its ratings are not commercially important to Sky. The rationale for its existence is to “add value” for those Sky pay-TV subscribers who are “passionate” about the arts – or some of them. “It’s okay to hate opera,” he says.
That means as well as programmes with relatively broad appeal, such as Guitar Star, it can afford to "cherry pick" audiences from the "aficionado" contingent, along a spectrum of interests from classical to modern. "You're not going to attract a huge audience to Wagner's Ring Cycle," he says.
Even Guitar Star isn't your typical reality show, with a focus on contestants' back-stories, but a culturally minded series "about talent and the joy of doing stuff".
Edgar-Jones says Sky Arts, which is enjoying a 10 per cent budget increase, can “be a little bit more maverick” than other channels, and judging by the new season preview, that’s a fair claim.
The former Big Brother executive producer (through its Channel 4 years) has commissioned the first TV drama by artists the Chapman brothers: a four-parter called The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, which he describes as "Mills & Boon on acid".
Elsewhere, there is the return of Scandi-drama The Legacy, Norwegian sitcom import Dag, a series of live performances in the Monday night Hot Tickets strand and a continuing commitment to showcasing the work of conductor / violinist André Rieu.
Kim Cattrall, Lenny Henry and Edith Bowman – who presents both Guitar Star and the documentary Songs to Have Sex To as part of a sex season – are among the names that will feature on the channel in the weeks ahead, while the relaunch night scheduled next Tuesday includes Birthday, a one-off based on a play by Joe Penhall about a pregnant man (Stephen Mangan).
There will be more Sensitive Skin, Cattrall's menopause-themed sitcom, "if Kim wants to do it", but for now she is returning in Ruby Robinson, part of a physical comedy strand that Edgar-Jones previewed in Kilkenny. The blurb says it "combines mime, acrobatics and jaw-dropping feats of corporeal movement to tell an unusual, comic morality tale". No, this is not ITV 2.
Winning projects
The channel has supported Irish arts organisations and artists in the past, and one of the winning projects in its current £3 million round of Sky Arts Amplify funding comes from Ireland. “I can’t tell you about it yet, but I’m super-excited about it,” he says.
He’s keen to do “a Celtic season”, once he has collected enough interesting ideas to sustain it. And they will come – for independent producers, pitching arts programmes is “a holiday from the relentless grind of coming up with gameshow ideas”.
Edgar-Jones is determined that Sky Arts doesn’t fall into the common arts trap. “I think the problem with arts television is that it’s often boring or perceived as boring,” he says. “People tell us they get put off by the word ‘arts’, that it feels either elitist or dull or like a lecture. It doesn’t have to be like that.”
Still, some forms of art are easier to televise than others. "I think books are hard to do on TV well," he says. The channel used to have a books show presented by Mariella Frostrup, but it was cancelled in 2013.
“Just sitting around talking about books that have come out doesn’t cut it anymore,” he maintains. “We are looking for new ways to do it – a little less conversation and a little more action.”
Poetry is also “hard to do”, but a spoken-word artist who participated in a channel mentoring scheme is currently developing a poetry-flavoured drama series. “I asked her to put more poetry in it,” he says, superfluously adding that this is “an unusual thing for a TV commissioner to say”.
