Friday Night Is Music Night

Friday's certainly music night on BBC Four. Next week we celebrate the return of Leonard Cohen to the world's stages with his acclaimed performance in London last year, a great Omnibus documentary from 1988 and a more recent archive doc What Leonard Cohen Did For Me.

As the channel's planning manager part of my job is to help create these themed evenings. It's very much a collaborative process. We talk with our commissioning teams across the BBC and they come back with ideas for programming - from landmark series on musical subgenres (our ongoing Britannia series on Jazz, Folk and Blues etc), to concert films, like the Leonard Cohen gig, that we've acquired the rights to.

There's no particular formula - whatever we think is interesting and has a good story to tell - it could be anything from record labels (so far Stiff, Island and Factory) to musical styles (be it Punk, Bluegrass or Motown) or individuals (we've done Cat Stevens, The Chieftains, Bruce Springsteen fairly recently). We then create a night of related material that (hopefully) keeps the audience engaged - though it's fair to say that we're less successful at that once we get past the 80s. I suppose the 80s just aren't not long enough ago to get nostalgic about quite yet. Or is it just that music was better in the 60s and 70s? You tell me!

We have some brilliant help, particularly from Mark Cooper and his team in BBC Music Entertainment, in creating new material from the archive. Our 'At the BBC' and Guitar Heroes for instance are a whole new way of re-purposing old material while opening it up to a new audience - and in a way that exposes them to music they might not necessarily choose to watch themselves.

For me it's more simple - I take the new programmes and use them as inspiration to truffle around in the archive looking for things that I haven't seen (at all, or for a long time). I'm like a kid in a sweet shop. It helps if you were an avid watcher of the Old Grey Whistle Test since the early 70s and worked on Top Of The Pops in the 80s - so understandably, I have a fairly eclectic mix of tastes - anything from Toscanini to blink-182.

Our hope and aim is to try and cover the whole canon of contemporary music with authoritative documentary, albeit over several years, and make BBC Four the home of intelligent, thoughtful and insightful music and put it in its historical and social context, but mixed with plenty of performance and great archive. Piece of cake!

Garrie Mallen is Planning Manager for BBC Four.