High drama

ITV's reputation for unadventurous populism is proving hard to shake off. Nick Elliott, the head of drama, hopes that its diverse new season will finally put that right. Louise Jury meets him

This weekend, ITV is bracing itself for a row. A new two-part drama, The Second Coming, stars Christopher Eccleston as the Son of God, returned to earth as the owner of a Manchester video shop. The script, by Russell T Davies, an affirmed atheist and the author of Queer as Folk, was rejected by the BBC and Channel 4, but Nick Elliott, controller of drama for ITV, had no qualms. The broadcaster has a strong commitment to "high-quality, challenging and audacious drama", he says. The Second Coming fitted the bill.

This is, of course, not the conventional view. With Coronation Street attracting record audiences with the story of the murderous Richard, ITV's reputation as the home of populism, possibly even the downmarket, may be hard to shake off. Sons and Lovers, its recent D H Lawrence adaptation, won some favourable notices and beat the BBC's police drama Merseybeat in the ratings, but one critic still suggested the channel would return to the same old rubbish for the rest of the year.

The accusation makes the normally avuncular Nick Elliott bristle. He responded by summoning journalists to a swish London hotel last week to announce details of a diverse range of new dramas. He concedes that, when he took over seven years ago, the schedules were packed with long-running police shows such as Heartbeat. But, he insists, that is no longer the case. Nor is he objecting to fair criticism. "Sometimes our programmes aren't ambitious and sometimes they're not popular and if they're neither ambitious nor popular they deserve all they get."

Yet he feels aggrieved that ITV got little credit last year for Doctor Zhivago, Shipman, Goodbye Mr Chips and the award-winning Bloody Sunday. This year there will be a dramatisation of the life of Danielle Cable, whose fiancé was murdered by Kenneth Noye in the M25 road-rage attack, an adaptation of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, and Island at War, a story set in the Channel Islands during the German occupation. The channel has already announced Boudica, starring Alex Kingston. "Has any other television station done anything about ancient Celts and Romans?" he asks in exasperation.

His point is that his prize shows are not an aberration. "They are central to our strategy. And the newer, less traditional ITV is up for this from the commercial point of view, too. They can't market ITV if there's nothing new to sell."

So virtually every week he now has at least one of these "event" pieces. They are good for attracting the best actors and writers. Iain Glen will appear in a film about Lockerbie, for instance. Advertising teams, Elliott claims, find it easier to sell slots around clear landmarks. And the best programmes attract the upmarket and young audiences that advertisers want.

More important for Elliott, he would not have come back to ITV, from a brief, unhappy stint at the BBC, if he had not been able to do more than safe, long-running shows. He is comfortably off – part of the London Weekend Television team who shared in the fortune when LWT was sold. He is still close friends with that team of John Birt, Greg Dyke and Melvyn Bragg, with whom he launched The South Bank Show. He has a house in Dorset and owns a couple of racehorses.

Friends say that he does not have to work, that he is simply passionate about what he does, reading every script himself. And while he despises the trendy metropolitan brand of television that he thinks has no resonance with ordinary people outside London, he in no sense emerges as a lowest-common-denominator operator. "Yet I still feel that if people think about ITV they think we're that downmarket channel."

Part of his problem is that the shows that remain the bulwark of the ITV schedules, shows such as Midsomer Murders and the Heartbeat hospital spin-off, The Royal, will never win the critics' praise or major awards. But they get nine million and 11 million viewers respectively.

At 58, Elliott has survived a long time in the cut-throat world of television. Asked what there is left for him to do, he reveals that he has one pet project of his own. His early life was spent in Ethiopia, where his father was part of the British mission aiding the emperor Haile Selassie. He wants to write a book about it, and thinks it would make a great film. He should know.