Forget about scuzzy sex shows – the arts are our future, says Sky

There’s a line in I’m Alan Partridge, during the famous pitching scene, where a desperate Partridge suggests to a BBC commissioner the idea of making a programme called “Inner City Sumo”, about fat wrestlers in a pub car-park. “If you don’t do it,” he says, “Sky will.”

For the past four years, BSkyB has been attempting, with limited success, to throw off its reputation for making freaky, salacious shows with titles such as The Unofficial World Records of Sex. Yes, its sports coverage is way out in front of the competition and its rolling news channel is garlanded. But much of the rest of the output is still widely regarded as being a bit scuzzy.

So now Sky is about make its big play to change that perception and one of its secret weapons, a trump card in its hand if you will, is bridge. Clive Anderson will present a new eight-part series called Grand Slam, where the likes of Susan Hampshire and Sue Lawley will be sitting around the card table with Alex James and James Mates. It’s is a key part of Sophie Turner-Laing’s grand strategy for re-positioning the Sky channels in the broadcasting market place.

In her first profile interview, she explains how she intends to make Sky’s programming so alluring that it will drive subscription sales just as much as the attraction of live football matches and the convenience of a Sky+ box. Part of the strategy means moving upmarket, making Sky the home of the arts on television.

“Arts is a much unloved genre in terrestrial television, the bane of most schedulers. Where the hell do they put it on that doesn’t scupper the ratings of their channel on a daily basis? You just look at the amount of arts programming on the terrestrials, it’s minimal,” she observes.

So while the terrestrial channels are retreating from this space, Sky is ramping up its offering. Having last year rebranded the niche channel Artsworld as Sky Arts, the broadcaster will from today move to a family of three arts channels. “You need different ways to attract new customers and engage them in a dialogue and arts is a fantastically emotive way of doing that because everyone has a great passion somewhere in the arts,” says Turner-Laing, in charge of 33 channels, the entire Sky portfolio outside of news and sport. “That could cover ballet on one side but equally on the other side, dad rock, which is for those of us who survived the 1970s and Eighties.”

Sky Arts 1, which will feature contemporary subject matter, will differ from the more “classically oriented” Sky Arts 2, following what she calls the “Tate Modern-Tate Britain approach”. In addition, there will be a Sky Arts high-definition channel.

The bridge show Grand Slam will be part of the new package on Sky Arts 1, even though it’s about cards and so hardly artistic. “I think bridge is part of a dimension that fits in with arts in that it’s a skill, and the kind of people who play bridge are very arts-friendly,” says Turner-Laing, not very convincingly. “It’s a hook to bring people in who may not have tried you before.”

Another new show, currently titled Commission Impossible, will see notorious art forger John Myatt painting John Cleese’s portrait in the style of Matisse. Johnny Vegas, Robin Gibb, Jane Horrocks, David Bailey and Ian Brown are among the other celebrity models queuing to pose for portraits in the style of a favourite artist.

On the same channel, one can also witness Suggs driving a Mini around Italy in a series called The Italian Job. Though he passes through Florence and Verona, taking in a visit to a Tuscan marble mine and a Stradivarius museum, a modern-day grand tour by the lead singer of Madness might not get all pulses racing among the Friends of the Royal Academy.

Still, this is not about elitism, says Turner-Laing, 47, sitting beneath a glass case filled with golden mask awards at Bafta in London, where she is on the board of trustees. “The arts transcend any class. We feel that it’s absolutely fine for 10,000 people to watch opera because that is 10,000 very happy subscribers and because ratings are not the be all and end all.”

On Sky Arts 2, operas will be shown in full. “We are able to devote enormous amounts of channel time to performance arts. Opera and ballet are not things you can squish into a one-hour slot,” says Turner Laing, who has bought in a showcase series featuring work from the Metropolitan Opera.

Turner-Laing also wants Sky to increase its output of original drama, though she doesn’t have the budget of ITV. Her most ambitious project is a dramatisation of David Almond’s magical novel Skellig. The 90-minute feature film will star Tim Roth, John Sim, Kelly Macdonald and Bill Milner.

Other drama projects include versions of Martina Cole’s novel The Take, Chris Ryan’s Strike Back and Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. She is targeting “known literary properties” because “that way we have immediate cut-through with audiences who are familiar with the book it is based on”.

She has responsibility for all the Sky Movies channels and is looking forward to the remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, an Anglo-American project in which Sky is the British partner. Russell Brand is top of her wish list to be cast as Dr Frank-N-Furter. “There are a lot of British actors having huge success in the US, so each side will be happy on the casting side, I have no doubt.”

In addition, Sky Movies will show The Clone Wars, George Lucas’s Stars Wars animation series and will premiere the new Tilda Swinton feature film Julia.

Though Turner-Laing is a governor of the National Film and Television School and a former head of programme acquisitions at the BBC, she realises Sky’s future can’t all be about high-brow programming. So she is also trying to capitalise on the phenomenal appeal of the sort of cheap women’s magazines that sell at check-outs for as little as 27p. “We looked at the enormous amount of women’s magazines that publish these real-life stories, it is the publishing phenomenon of the past decade.”

Sky Real Lives is “unashamedly focused on women” and intended to release what is termed as “the female handbrake”, that cranks into action at the typically blokey suggestion that a Sky subscription is merited by the sports coverage.

Turner-Laing praises the work of her colleague Richard Woolfe in sharpening the identity of the flagship channel Sky1, for example by recreating the West End musical Hairspray with a cast from a school in Enfield, north London. But Turner-Laing reserves her most breathless praise for Woolfe’s lupine namesake, the old bloke in Gladiators. “Wolf is coming back for season two,” she reveals. “He’s been such a big hit with the audience. Phenomenal! He was the oldest gladiator during the original series and he is the one of whom everyone has these incredibly fond memories.”

Meanwhile, Ross Kemp, having improved Sky1’s reputation for documentary-making with his reports from Kenya and Afghanistan (“Ross is just back from Afghanistan, he came back having been shot at, a-gain, but luckily unscathed”), is about to undergo a brand extension that may see the self-styled tough guy return to his thespian roots. “Where next for Ross is something we are in active development on. Whether that includes a return to drama, who knows?,” she says, raising the subject herself.

Turner-Laing’s portfolio is as diverse as it is deep. One moment she is commissioning Selina Scott to profile the obscure Norwich painter Edward Seago, the next she is giving new work to a 56-year-old gladiator.

And with bridge now in the mix, she believes she’s not missing a trick.