Grade pledges quality at heart of ITV shake-up

Grade, who was poached from the chairmanship of the BBC to turn round an ailing ITV nine months ago, said: "There are lots of new shows coming. There will be a major face-lift for ITV1.

"The channel has to be fresher, better and higher quality. I want to see fewer single 90-minute dramas and more high-quality drama series that run for 13 weeks at least.

"I want to increase our share of 'light' viewers in the key time slots." He said he wants far more quality dramas like Cold Feet and the Morse successor Lewis.

"We have fallen way behind. We lost our edge with the 9pm slot during the week, although we're doing very well at the weekend," he said. "We currently have less than half of that peak-time, we have to win it back."

Reality TV shows would appear "only if they really work well" and he promised "no more poor copies of other people's programmes". That includes Tycoon, the recent failed attempt to copy Sir Alan Sugar's The Apprentice.

Grade also promised that programmes would be scrapped "before they have been on too long or passed their sell-by date" - something which some critics say has happened to the current series of Hell's Kitchen.

ITV1, the flagship channel, has been losing its audience for the past four years as more and more households switch to multichannel television. That began with Sky but has increased sharply since the arrival of Freeview.

But better viewing figures today showed the loss of viewers is slowing down, with more than eight out of 10 homes having already switched to multichannel television well ahead of the official digital switchover in five years' time.

Grade recently poached Dawn Airey from rival Sky to be ITV's head of content, and today she is being charged with doubling the amount of money ITV makes from its own programmes - from the present £600 million to £1.2 billion by 2012. That will come not just from broadcasting but from internet and DVD sales.

Mr Grade said: "Paul Potts, who won Britain's Got Talent, has received more than 30 million hits on YouTube... internet companies are desperate for our content."

"In the old days ITV made a programme costing a million quid an hour, showed it on our one channel twice and then it disappeared into the archive. Now we have our own shop windows in ITV1, ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4 which makes it a lot easier to sell overseas."

But Grade said that ITV1 stalwarts Coronation Street and Emmerdale were not under threat. "By God, I'll say they're safe. They are the jewels in the crown of ITV."

However, he is planning to pull the plug on the controversial ITV Play phone-in quiz because the negative publicity surrounding it had caused calls to drop sharply.

Grade also said that he wants ITV2 to overtake Five as the third most popular commercial channel for the key 16 to 34-year-old market.