Why Tim Marlow is worrying about arts being put in a TV ghetto

Tim Marlow has a host of epiphany-style anecdotes describing his encounters with art, and tells each with a zeal suggesting it occurred yesterday. The tale of the first time he clapped eyes on Matisse's The Dance, during a visit to Russia in the early 1990s, is especially pertinent here, as this painting is the centrepiece of the Royal Academy of Arts's "From Russia" exhibition.

Marlow, who will give viewers a guided tour of the exhibition tomorrow on Sky Arts, recalls that he was rattling across Europe on a lorry, recording a piece on a Henry Moore exhibition being installed in Scandinavia for Kaleidoscope, the Radio 4 arts show. On arrival at St Petersburg he rushed to The State Hermitage Museum to see the Matisse work. His then girlfriend was a huge fan of Matisse and he recorded his reaction to the canvas in real time, and sent her the tape.

"Afterwards I thought: 'What an arrogant idiot!'" he admits. "It's never been broadcast and we're not together anymore, but I knew at the time that it was an incredibly powerful work. I could hardly speak when I went in there. I was stumbling and bumbling a bit." Though evidently no less in awe of it today, he manages not to stumble or bumble when introducing it in the latest Tim Marlow on..., the series that brings art exhibitions out of their rarefied homes and onto the telly.

He hit upon the idea of filmed gallery tours about six years ago, after presenting The Great Artists for Five. A radical new scheduling policy had catapulted Marlow into prime-time, an attempt by Five's then director of programmes, Kevin Lygo, to lift arts broadcasting out of its usual graveyard slot, and drag the channel's image upmarket.

This gave Marlow an unusually prominent profile for an arts broadcaster, and the move was praised from many quarters of the arts world, including fellow presenter Melvyn Bragg.

Marlow had strong connections with the Tate Galleries and was editor of the arts magazine Tate. He was convinced that the upcoming Matisse Picasso exhibition was going to be a huge hit and pitched the idea of filming a simple walk-around gallery tour, presented by himself, which would manage to skirt many of the copyright issues which complicate around showing works of art on television.

Marlow is adamant his gallery tours should be fun, and certainly not didactic. "I don't think people have got enough time in their lives to tune in to hear someone ranting about why they think that Vermeer or Rembrandt or Velazquez is not a very good artist, because it's just boring. I speak from a personal point of view when I make television programmes. My opinions about the great art of the past matter a little, but my passion and curiosity are more important. The idea of trying to make a journey through an exhibition is the most important thing."

On the morning we meet, Marlow is at the scene of his day job as the director of exhibitions of White Cube, Jay Jopling's seasoned, though still decidedly hip, east London gallery.

He rushes in enthusing about the previous night's Antony Gormley opening, still in his scooter helmet, and wearing a silk cravat, and sits down to explain what happened to Five's grand plan for the arts: his shows were recently axed from the channel's schedule.

"It was a slow demise at Five. The biggest audience we ever got was about 800,000. That's enormous in comparison with the number of people who go and see exhibitions. I don't think an arts programme is ever going to deliver five or 10 million people."

The entire back catalogue has been sold to the niche digital channel Sky Arts, though, and will be broadcast over the next two years. Outside the UK the programmes will go out on BBC Worldwide. "We may have dramatically reduced our audience in Britain, which is sad, but we have dramatically increased our audience in general," he says.

Does it matter if people are spurred to visit the exhibition, as happened with Matisse Picasso and others since?

"I love it when we get reports from museums of galleries that people are coming because they've seen the programme, but I am careful about imploring people to do things on the telly. I'm not the preacher in the pulpit saying, 'go and see art'. People who try to convert you to their beliefs can be tedious. I don't think art makes people better individuals. I think it can change the way people see the world and have a profound impact on people, but the idea that crowds of people should be implored by people like me to go and look at art because it will change their lives seems utterly arrogant."

Sky Arts began life as Artsworld, a subscription-only arts channel launched in 2001 by Jeremy Isaacs. Sky stepped in when, with just 25,000 paying viewers, it faced closure in 2003.

"I worry about the ghetto-isation of arts and that it has to be on a separate channel," says Marlow. "But I think that's the inevitability of the proliferation of channels and I think they deliver great stuff." He thinks the BBC could do more here. "A public-service broadcaster like the BBC ought to be liberated from the constraints of delivering big audiences for certain subjects like arts or science."

Marlow flits elegantly between the worlds of art and broadcasting. His gallery shows have mass appeal and are light on content; they might well be called A Beginner's Guide to..., but they have been greeted with warmth and very little snootiness from both television and art critics. He presented Radio 4's Kaleidoscope during the 1990s while editing Tate, joined Five in 1998 for more than 100 programmes and is a regular on Newsnight Review. Four years ago he joined White Cube and two years later began Culture Shock, a BBC World Service radio programme reporting innovative creative and technological ephemera, such as a sustainable club in Rotterdam, where the ravers generate the power, solutions to global water-shortages and street trends in Accra or Mumbai, with an audience of 45 million.

Upcoming Marlow shows on Sky Arts include tours of Klimt, Rothko and Bacon exhibitions, all at Tate galleries, and a new series called Tim Marlow Meets..., though his guests have not yet been confirmed.

"I'm going to talk to creative people, the great and the good. I can't say who they will be yet but I would like to talk to Richard Rogers, Martin Scorsese, Grayson Perry and Michael Palin, about what role art has had in their lives and which art has meant the most to them."

Tim Marlow on 'From Russia at the Royal Academy of Arts', tomorrow at 8pm on Sky Arts, Channel 267