Keating looks to secure Two's future

BBC Two controller Roly Keating has outlined his plans to secure the channel's place in a mature multichannel marketplace.

Keating acknowledged that Two remains a minority channel against the likes of BBC One and ITV1, and that as such it is essential that it find points of differentiation in a marketplace increasingly crowded with minority services - some of which seek to trample on the channel's traditional stomping grounds of cookery and lifestyle.

He denied, however, that BBC Two was seeking to become a general entertainment channel on the back of successes such as Dragon's Den and Top Gear.

"BBC Two is a very purpose driven channel," he told discussion moderator Kirsty Wark. "The beauty of BBC Two is that it has strong mainstream entertainment values and can get a big share but part of what we're there to do is to deliver knowledge... the alchemy of popular storytelling television."

He added that "something about the scale of BBC Two" permits it to deliver knowledge through a "rich mix of journalism and entertainment and smart, popular documentaries."

He said that BBC Two would survive a budget squeeze - in particular, the near-decimation of cash available for specialist factual - by becoming "smarter". He claimed to have anticipated such a squeeze two years ago because of the BBC's shift away from spending on content and to what he described as "the scale of new things" such as what has become iPlayer. "It was clear we'd have to cut our cloth pretty tightly," he explained.

Keating acknowledged that BBC Two viewers would see more repeats in early prime and in the late nights. He said that would be necessary in order for the channel to be able to "spend well, strongly, on original content" for primetime. He added that unlike repeat patterns of old, where channel controllers simply "reached into the back catalogue," repeats on BBC Two would be "narrative repeats" that either fit into a wider programming theme or formed a second-chance viewing window; techniques he examined while head of the BBC's digital channels.

He said that he hoped BBC Two would get back to a tradition of "spiky individualism" and be a "hotline from the edge of culture into the mainstream."