BBC Four: Keating happy with first week

Roly Keating, controller of the BBC's new digital arts station BBC Four, has described ratings figures for the channel's first week on air as "encouraging".

"It's doing comfortably better than Knowledge. Tuesday showed a healthy peak of 60,000 viewers for the News which is really encouraging," he said in an online chat with media Guardian. "Launch night was actually a 20,000 average, not the 11,000 figure reported in the press, which excluded cable. Digital reach so far is actually 180,000 - good figures. And the total reach on the first night including BBC2 was 7 million - exactly the result we wanted."

Talking about BBC Four's competition, Keating praised Channel 5 for some of its "bold" programming recently. "Warhol was good on Channel 4. The South Bank Show still does some strong pieces, but always late night now. And although the quality's a bit variable I think Channel 5 has been quite bold in some of its recent arts scheduling," he said. "Artsworld, Performance and Digital Classics seem to me to be doing a good job in a digital marketplace which is still in its infancy.

"Arts is only part of the BBC4 message: dedicated lovers of performance may well want to subscribe to more specialist services which offer them more of what they really want - but overcome their in-built resistance to digital TV. That's where BBC4 can potentially play a role.

"The other channels all offer good programmes (although both are more 'pure arts' than BBC4) and I hope there's room for all sorts of services in the mix," he continued. "We can co-produce programmes with them, and over time draw people into multichannel for the first time who might turn out to be potential customers for their services."