BBC2 is entering the Saturday night ratings battle, taking on The X Factor, Strictly and Casualty with poetry, dance and Alan Bennett.

The channel said from autumn it would replace the jumble of repeats normally shown at that time with programmes dedicated to arts and culture.

Patrick Holland, the editor of BBC2, said arts were central to the channel’s mission. “I want BBC2 to be the most creative channel on TV,” he said.

“It is a place where the audience comes to find out about the world. It doesn’t shy away from complexity, it revels in specialism and detail, but it also speaks to broader audiences.”

There will be documentaries and performances, but Jonty Claypole, the director of BBC Arts, admitted that the arts magazine and review programmes of yesteryear had probably had their day.

“The thing that has really damaged those sorts of shows is on demand viewing,” he said. Being able to come home and watch an episode of Stranger Things or House of Cards “has really damaged the ability to get audiences to watch magazine roundup shows,” Claypole said.

BBC2’s Saturday night season will begin on 1 October with an evening of poetry and spoken word-themed programmes.

It will include the performance artist Kate Tempest, who merges hip-hop, poetry and theatre, giving a live rendition of her album, Let Them Eat Chaos, at the Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley, south London.

There will also be a contemporary twist on WH Auden and Benjamin Britten’s Night Mail, with a documentary featuring six British poets. Sabrina Mahfouz, Michael Symmons Roberts, Liz Berry, Andrew McMillan, Imtiaz Dharker and Sean O’Brien have been filmed observing and interpreting the human stories they saw on a train from London to Glasgow.

Poems by Jackie Kay, Lemn Sissay and Ian Duhig will feature in BBC2 idents on 1 October.

Elsewhere in the season, Michael Palin will meet the travel writer and historian Jan Morris, while Julie Walters will interview Willy Russell, the writer of Shirley Valentine and Blood Brothers.

Other commissions include a first full-length feature film by dance company BalletBoyz, telling the stories of young soldiers, a programme about the Adrian Mole creator, Sue Townsend, and a behind-the-scenes film about auction house Christie’s, which celebrates its 250th anniversary this year.

The season will continue until Christmas, when Alan Bennett’s Diaries, a programme following the 82-year-old writer around over the course of a year, will be shown.

Inspired by his diaries, the programme goes with Bennett to New York as he accepts an award from the city’s public library, and to his local community run library in Primrose Hill, which, he despairs, some would rather see turned into a Pizza Hut.

The BBC said Bennett would speak about his relationship with his long-term partner, Rupert Thomas, and say he has always wanted to keep a donkey.

Mark Bell, the BBC’s commissioning editor for arts, said: “They are not all going to be back of the net ratings-wise, we’re not expecting that. We’re expecting to feel we have put together an exciting, sometimes challenging, schedule of cultural output … I hope it is all rather inspiring for people.”

Bell said the change aimed to make BBC2 “a cultural destination” on Saturday nights, an alternative to the light entertainment battle between BBC1 and ITV.

The poetry night broadcast will be the first in a series of programmes called Performance Live, a two-year project in partnership with Battersea Arts Centre and Arts Council England, in which artists and arts organisations will produce their own TV programmes.

There will also be three Saturday nights in October devoted to books and reading, including profiles, interviews and documentaries around the 2016 Man Booker prize.

But Claypole said there were no plans for a book review show, as such shows work far better on radio than TV.

“When we look through the BBC archive, the things that have real value are documentaries and author profiles. I would never look at a books discussion review show from 1974, it has no archival value. What does are the Omnibuses, Arenas and Monitors,” he said.