Giving away the storyline

As drama chief at the BBC, Jane Tranter is used to carping over quality and lack of big-name talent. But, she tells Louise Jury, with a cash boost and better ratings, her critics may be in for a surprise

Jane Tranter, the BBC's controller for drama commissioning, does not routinely read what is written about her shows. Not because she is arrogant or doesn't care, but because she thinks it would drive her mad if she read all the criticisms every day. "Look what it does to celebrities," she says.

But she did take note when Harold Pinter told recently how the BBC had failed to respond to an offer to broadcast one of his plays. She looks distraught at the thought that she would not want to talk to Pinter. "If Harold Pinter rang me, I would probably feel that all my Christmases had come at once. As far as I'm concerned, the guy is a demi-god. Of course I want to work with people like him," she says.

So what exactly happened in that case may never become clear. Perhaps it was a case of missed calls or mixed messages, or it may even have been before she was in charge. But Tranter is adamant that it is not through lack of ambition that certain famous names are not associated with the BBC.

Some, she points out, just do not want to know. Tom Stoppard declined an offered commission. But the playwright Howard Brenton worked on the spy drama Spooks and Stephen Poliakoff resisted advances from Channel 4 to write The Lost Prince. Joe Penhall, who wrote the National Theatre's hit Blue/Orange, looks set to come on board, she reveals, to adapt Jake Arnott's East End crime thriller The Long Firm. The old tradition of writers familiar to film or theatre working for the BBC is far from dead.

Indeed, writers, directors and actors who not so long ago seemed lost to the BBC – or who once would have refused to work there – are returning, she says. "Lots of actors" wanted to be in a series about Charles II that started filming last week, in which Rufus Sewell is playing the king. And agents are increasingly reading scripts and offering their stars, she says. A clutch of famous names is currently in talks for six Canterbury Tales.

"There was a point about five years ago when BBC drama just didn't feel confident enough and it was imitative rather than innovative," she says. Two factors mean more drama on the BBC today than there has been for a decade. First, the move of the News to 10pm created time in the schedule. And there's more cash because Greg Dyke, the director general, gave her department an extra £90m two years ago as a result of his internal cost-cutting. "So we can tackle drama with more confidence and, because we're doing more of it, we're able to sound just about every note in the dramatic form." They have been able to make "juggernauts" like Daniel Deronda and The Lost Prince as well as Spooks and EastEnders.

The audiences have noticed. In a reversal of fortunes, she claims that research shows a much higher approval rating for BBC drama than for that of its rival, ITV. "But we don't get the credit from some of the people who chat and write about us. There are some good reasons for that – everybody has enormous expectations of the BBC. And it's surprising when ITV suddenly produces Bloody Sunday and puts itself above the parapet. It's right to make a fuss about that and applaud it."

But she wonders whether they ought to be "flashier and splashier" about what they are doing. She suspects that some of the most vocal critics may be people who go out absorbing culture in other forms instead of watching TV. Many lament the passing of Play for Today, but there are still plenty of single dramas and plays, such as the prison-based Tomorrow La Scala! or Out of Control, a piece about a young lad who ends up in a young offenders' institution, or Flesh and Blood, which starred Christopher Eccleston with two mentally disabled people as his parents. Such works were not broadcast under a Play for Today banner. Neither were they set in a studio – which conveys the sensation of a "play" – because they don't have to be these days. "Something like Flesh and Blood is in many ways classic Play for Today territory – except I don't think they would have used the actors we used," she says.

Tranter's early ambitions were in theatre. But finding herself broke and deciding others were playing the fringe better, she got a temporary job as a BBC secretary and realised that this was where she wanted to be. Starting as an assistant floor manager, she moved her way up through the ranks to arrive today, aged 40, in charge of commissioning more than 500 hours of drama a year. It is a position she now juggles with caring for 16-month-old twins.

Ask her what her job is about and she says "storytelling – telling good stories". There is much talk these days of "ground-breaking" television, but she thinks that is not the main point in drama – though she does think that some of her projects, such as the satire about Jeffrey Archer, have deserved the phrase. But for much of the time, good drama simply involves "unfamiliar ways of doing the familiar". A good script is the starting point, she says, emphasising that she does not have to take the commercial approach, which requires finding a show to appeal to a certain audience demographic at 9pm, in order to keep the advertisers happy.

But there are still those critics. While she has continued the BBC tradition of classy adaptations of classic novels, this newspaper, for one, has observed that theatrical greats such as Shakespeare, Chekhov and Ibsen have been notably absent. They are not banished, she insists. If her staff can think of good ways of using television to do them, they will be done, she says.

Besides, just such classics are on the cards. "The fact that we haven't done them in the last three years is simply because we've been doing other things," she says. Jane Tranter tries not to be influenced by the conflicting demands of her critics, and it may be the "intelligent, rude and poignant" hairdressers' drama Cutting It that she sees as a signature Tranter commission. But it turns out that those who have called for Chekhov on the BBC should take a close look at the schedules next year.