Mark Cooper is Creative Head of Music Entertainment for BBC TV, overseeing long-running shows like Later With Jools Holland, annual events like the BBC's Glastonbury coverage and much applauded documentaries like Folk Britannica. As the BBC increases the number of channels it uses and prepares itself for TV on demand, he talks to David Hepworth about the whys and wherefores of music on TV now and in the future.

Why has Later hung on so long when other music programmes have been and gone?

It's a very BBC programme. It's very public service. It's an arts approach to music as opposed to a bums-on-seats approach. The question is "is it good? Does it matter?"

How many people watch it?

It's somewhere round half a million per sitting and now that it has two showings it's a million.

That's about the number of people who used to watch Whistle Test all those years ago.

I think it's the same group of people. There's a hard core of people who love music and that's unlikely to grow.

If you book a superstar does it increase the audience?

No. There's not a huge floating voter audience. It doesn't go up with the heavy hitters or down with the people who are not well known. Because people who watch Later have come to trust in it. They believe in it.

Presumably playing in a circle is a key part of the show.

It is but rather stupidly I didn't realise that for five years. We did it in order to shoot them in a 360 degree way. But then I realised that putting artists opposite each other made them play well and gave it that killing floor, gladiatorial element.

Ever been offered a bribe to put anyone on the TV?

Sadly no. Your independence has no price. That's why I work at the BBC.

What are the issues involved in clearing old archive footage for showing again?

There's a lot of talk about the BBC making its archive more available. It's going to happen. We're not too far from a future where everything is downloadable - at a price. What people don't realise is the cost of archive footage. If we do something like Hotel California the archive budget is often a quarter of the cost of making the programme. If we want to put something out on DVD it's the same cost of making the programme all over again, just to clear the archive. Which is why things don't come out on DVD. And sometimes why programmes only get shown once.

Is Glastonbury a good opportunity to get a load of people all at once?

When we started doing it we hit the motherlode. We started in 1997 and we joined the festival with Radiohead doing Paranoid Android and it's still in live television terms the moment I'm most proud of because we hit the moment.

What programmes do you want to make but can't?

Tough documentaries. For instance there's an idea for doing a programme about music and the Mafia which would be very hard to do and might not get commissioned. But in the last few years I've got to make programmes about things I've always loved. Folk Britannica, Hotel California, where I've been able to go back to subjects and bring a new documentary commitment to them. I've been very lucky. At the moment we're just finishing a programme that will be called Prog Britannica. I wanted to see what those people thought, the people who were dishinerited by punk. Not to visit their bitterness, but to visit the wonder that made them make that music. I think a lot of Word readers will enjoy it just as much as I do.

You can hear Mark talking to David about these and other issues in detail, including the night Jah Wobble refused to join the groove and the sad death of "Top Of The Pops" on the latest Backstage podcast from Word. Either listen below or go here to subscribe for free and Backstage podcasts will be delivered to your digital door whenever they appear.

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