After the decline of the docusoap and the proliferation of the talent show, the BBC has hit on a new winning TV formula: the highbrow hit parade.
The corporation announced yesterday that it is to follow its successful search for the greatest Briton with a hunt for the country's best-loved book.
Like the Great Britons series, in which Winston Churchill triumphed over Brunel and Diana, Princess of Wales, the Big Read will culminate in 10 programmes fronted by well-known personalities advocating their favourites. The public will be able to vote for the greatest work of literature in the English language.
The BBC will encourage viewers to join book groups, rather like those promoted in the US by the chatshow host Oprah Winfrey. A Big Read website will put readers in touch with each other.
"It's an attempt to turn reading, which can be a very private experience, into something which can be enjoyed together," said the BBC2 controller, Jane Root.
The season will be launched in March, and will culminate in the autumn with a live showdown, similar to the final of Great Britons, which was hosted by Anne Robinson and gathered 1.6m votes - putting it on a similar scale to the Popstars and Fame Academy talent show polls.
It was watched by 3.3m people, well above average for a BBC2 programme, and was referred to by Tony Blair in parliament. Ms Root believes there will be a similar enthusiasm for the literary version.
Not content with promoting the joys of books, the channel is also screening a week-long appreciation of love poetry to coincide with Valentine's Day. Readings of more than 25 poems will fill the gaps between programmes in the middle of February. Famous faces have been lined up to present the poems, including Jimi Mistry, Christopher Lee, Prunella Scales, Ralph Little and Alison Steadman.
The life of the poet Philip Larkin will be explored in a drama-documentary starring Hugh Bonneville and Tara Fitzgerald.
Writer Daisy Goodwin will present a series of programmes to accompany the poetry readings. She said yesterday that poetry was a neglected area of literature, only remembered at weddings and funerals.
Ms Root said the Great Britons series, and BBC2's popular history programmes, had proved there was an appetite in Britain for intelligent television. "There is a sense in Britain that there is a huge desire to find out about these things," she said at the launch of the channel's winter season yesterday.
The US drama 24 returns in early 2003 for a second series, this time with terrorists threatening to detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. Steven Spielberg's alien abduction series Taken, which started last week in the US on the Sci-Fi Channel, will be shown on BBC2 this winter.
Writers choose top classics
Linda Grant's top 10
Ulysses by James Joyce
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure by Shakespeare
Isaac Babel's short stories (Soviet writer murdered by Stalin)
Paradise Lost by John Milton
A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Emma by Jane Austen
Sabbath's Theatre by Philip Roth
· Linda Grant is a novelist
Sean O'Brien's top 10
Collected Poems by WH Auden
Emma by Jane Austen
Les fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
The Inferno by Dante
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Poems by John Donne
The King James Bible
Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann
Shakespeare (his works)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
· Sean O'Brien is the only poet to have won the Forward Prize twice
Giles Foden's top 10
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
'They flee from me that sometime did me seek' by Thomas Wyatt
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
In Memoriam by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Middlemarch by George Eliot
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Selected Poems by WH Auden
· Giles Foden is deputy literary editor of the Guardian and author of three novels
