Women We Loved on BBC Four

Women We Loved - well, I certainly love them now - Enid, Gracie and Margot, that is.



After a three week rollercoaster of a season called Women We Loved, BBC Four has recorded some of its highest viewing figures ever, including a 1.4 million audience for Gracie!, about Gracie Fields. In the previous week Enid - about children's writer Enid Blyton - won over 1.3m viewers. And last night the season ended with a fine film starring Anne Marie Duff playing Margot Fonteyn.



Now, ballet doesn't usually rate anywhere. Sky Arts' documentary about Margot - coincidentally played out just the night before BBC Four's drama - rated 2,000 viewers. So I wasn't holding my breath. But over 750,000 people came to watch BBC Four's film, and for that I am both grateful and delighted.



It is always a bit of gamble to commit to three big dramas based around a single subject, especially one about the arts, in this way - and women artists at that. So I was a little apprehensive.



And when I first turned up at the office last week and looked over to the channel scheduler to enquire about how Enid had done - the first of the three films to transmit - he rolled his eyes and said: ''There's a '3' in the figures.''



Now I know BBC Four isn't just about share and ratings. It is reputation that counts. But still, my heart sank. Only 300,000 viewers! This had Helena Bonham Carter playing Enid and the drama team had worked miracles to make the film as wonderful as possible.



''Actually it's 1.3 million,'' said the channel scheduler after a pause. He'll have to go.



When I first commissioned these three films the idea was to try and reflect the private lives of three women who had lived their lives very much in the public eye. All three women were artists, serious players in the artistic worlds they chose to inhabit: Enid, one of the greatest writers of children's literature and certainly the most prolific; Gracie Fields, one of Britain's greatest female singers and entertainers; and Margot Fonteyn, possibly Britain's finest ballerina and certainly its most famous.



But it isn't easy having a private life when you're striving for greatness, and these films sought to explore the demands of that coexistence. Across the season three separate stories showed how these women tried to lead complex lives and how they each in seperate ways dealt with different pressures - some handling it well and some handling it pretty badly.



It is a hallmark of BBC Four's drama output that the channel provides a platform for performance. In all three cases the central leads - Helena as Enid Blyton, Jane Horrocks as Gracie Fields and Anne-Marie Duff as Margot Fonteyn - delivered in spades, and I am grateful to their efforts.



I've been thinking hard about how to expand BBC Four drama output. I want to carry on what is a fine tradition of biopics here. Next up, in early January, is Sophie Okonedo's extraordinary depiction of Winnie Mandela; and then Christopher Eccleston plays Beatle John Lennon in a powerful exploration of why he broke up the Beatles and went to America. Blame it on the parents, I say.



But I am also going to be taking drama in a new direction. I still think it is important to offer audiences something that they instantly recognise. So, a true story like Canoe Man, which tells the story of John Darwin, who went missing in his canoe and was presumed dead until he turned up five years later living next door to his wife, is a high-profile subject for a factual drama.



But I am also keen to open up the channel to other expressions of drama, and one way we will do so is via modern adaptations of 20th-century classics. I have commissioned a new season for next year potentially called Modern Love. This seeks to explore the story of how men and women have changed in their relationships between each other, as seen through literary classics of the 20th century. To that end I have commissioned two new dramas - DH Lawrence's Women In Love, and John Braine's Room At The Top. Both of these novels take very different approaches to the same subject, and both are sometimes overlooked, which makes them intriguing subjects for our first adaptations. They'll form the backbone of the season, with a range of other programming examining the same subject from different angles. Modern adaptations are an exciting new direction for drama on the channel and one which I hope the viewers will love as much as our biopics of Enid, Gracie and Margot. We're hoping to attract the same calibre of actors to the project and as soon as I have news I will share it with you, but if you would like to read more about the two adaptations for BBC Four, please click here.