First we had the pop music talent shows such as Pop Idol and Fame Academy. Then came the West End musical talent shows How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? and I'd Do Anything! We've even had an opera talent show with the relatively high-brow Operatunity.

Talent: Matt Clark has reached the final 40 in The School of Saatchi

Now, rather extraordinarily, Charles Saatchi has entered the fray. Next week sees the first episode of a new contemporary art contest called The School of Saatchi, in which fledgling artists —some are graduates of art schools, others pure amateurs — compete to win patronage from the art-loving recluse himself. The first prize is a place in a Saatchi group show at The Hermitage in St Petersburg. It's a golden ticket, effectively, to a career in the professional art world.

Saatchi of the North: Manchester-based art collector Frank Cohen, one of The School of Saatchi's judge

So has art gone all X Factor? Entirely characteristically, Saatchi himself is never shown on-screen and instead sends a Sloaney representative from his gallery to voice his opinions on the merits of the young artists' efforts. Following an elimination round that narrows 100 hopefuls down to six, Saatchi sets the contestants a new artistic challenge each week and the resulting work is then inspected by four other judges: Tracey Emin, one of Saatchi's most high-profile “finds”; Barbican curator Kate Bush; critic and presenter Matthew Collings; and Frank Cohen, the Manchester-based art collector who is often called The Saatchi of the North.

Chasing the golden ticket: hopeful artist Suki Cha

Cohen is also the brave soul who has agreed to defend the show's concept against inevitable charges of dumbing-down. He insists that “the whole thing was Charles's idea,” laughing loudly. “He innovated all of it, and I think he chose me to be a judge cos he knew I'd not be boring.”

Future of art: Ben Lowe is in the running for the prize

Cohen is worth an estimated £40 million, a fortune he made with a chain of 50 DIY stores across the north of England, and he owns more than 1,500 works of art, many of which he shows at his self-built gallery in Wolverhampton. Wearing thick-rimmed David Hockney-esque spectacles and sporting a very Mancunian haircut (think Liam Gallagher circa 1995), Cohen is a cheerful, good-natured chap, apparently without a cynical bone in his body. At the age of 66, he rarely gives interviews, but in this case feels duty-bound to justify the TV show: “Charles knows I'll stand here and front it up. I don't mind getting the stick.”

So is Saatchi merely aping Cowell here, making easy telly by exploiting, then disappointing, young ambition? “It's more a documentary in my opinion,” replies Cohen, a little desperately.

“It's not like the X Factor for the simple reason that you haven't got an audience standing and screaming and baying for blood. I think Saatchi wants the programme to come over as a serious take on the processes of contemporary art rather than a competition. It doesn't cheapen art at all; if anything, it'll educate people in how contemporary art is made and what it means.”

Nice try. But a competition it undoubtedly is, and though the whole thing has a patina of BBC taste and quality, every episode builds inexorably to that moment when the young artist is told either that they've got a golden star from Saatchi — or that they're rubbish and need to try a whole lot harder. At one point, Emin (the sharpest tongue on the panel) tells one young hopeful who has made a sculpture out of blue plastic chairs that his work is “the biggest load of bullshit”.

“These are kids, we don't exploit them,” says Cohen. “I mean, I've seen some of them cry but I cried at the end of the show when the winner was announced and I'm a very tough cookie indeed. Tracey was shocked. She said: blimey, you've got feelings!'”

Of course, contemporary art as competition is nothing new — look at the Turner Prize — and isn't necessarily a bad thing. School of Saatchi is riveting TV, even if (or rather, I fear, because) the editors of the programme invite us to wince at the contestants' cock-ups and snigger at their youthful pretentiousness. In episode two, we see them making public art in Hastings — fake rocks that fall apart, empty zoo cages, barns made out of scaffolding and meaningless star-shaped bits of metal stuck on an old boat.

All good fun for us. But what's in it for Saatchi? An obvious theory is that he's attempting to claw back the influence he's lost over the past decade. Once the most important single figure in British contemporary art, he slipped from 14 to 72 in this year's prestigious ArtReview Power 100, which must have hurt. In the context of today's global art market, the dominant, Saatchi-sponsored Britart movement of the mid-Nineties looks parochial and insular.

Today London is home to artists, gallerists and collectors from all over the world — and Saatchi, simply, is no longer the big fish he was. Until the recent art market crash, moreover, very few British contemporary collectors could compete with the new international rich at auction.

“I have to say I'm glad it's gone down with a bang,” says Cohen, “because that [over-inflated] market stopped me from buying, and I think it stopped Charles, too. It was ridiculous. The world was awash with money, the Indians, Chinese and Arabs appeared with colossal sums, and people were spending huge amounts of money on stuff that just wasn't worth it.”

Despite his £40 million fortune and a collection of art that includes Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, as well as Turner Prize-winning Brit artist Martin Creed and the Chapman Brothers, he says he felt priced out of the market: “I didn't buy for 18 months. I've never bought art as an investment but because I like individual pieces of work — but the prices were definitely stopping me from buying.”

Even now, the most sought-after pieces of contemporary art are fetching astonishing prices — an Andy Warhol silkscreen, 200 One Dollar Bills, went for almost $44 million in New York last week, more than three times its top estimate — but Cohen believes that, for most living artists, the days of multi-million sales are effectively over.

So perhaps Charles Saatchi is doing a Cowell in order to raise his profile as fairy godfather to young artists. Unlike Cohen — who generally buys artists with established reputations — Saatchi has always trawled the graduate shows and bought art at its very inception, by complete unknowns.

Of course he deserves credit for this, and perhaps School of Saatchi will demonstrate his nose for potential talent and, even, a certain philanthropic attitude towards young artists.

Never forget, however, that Saatchi was once one of the world's most successful admen. His greatest success has been to commercialise and popularise contemporary British art, and to make everyone aspire to owning it. Seen in that context, making artists compete for his favour on prime-time TV — just like Jedward before a scowling Cowell — doesn't seem like a very radical step at all.
School of Saatchi starts on BBC2 on Monday.