This is the first in a series of interviews with senior managers and execs at the BBC. Coming soon, an interview with Commissioning Editor, BBC Music & Events Jan Younghusband and Head of Arts Production, Jonty Claypole.

Guidelines for the submission of programme ideas for BBC One, Two, Three and Four can be found in Mark Bell's development briefing documents on the BBC Commissioning website.

Full details of the arts programming for 2012 and 2013 can be found on the BBC Media Centre website.

In this blog interview, Commissioning Editor, Arts, Mark Bell highlights some of the programmes that form part of the season and what he hopes viewers and listeners will get out of it.

Why Shakespeare now?

Around the country there is an amazing festival of Shakespeare related activity - the RSC, The Globe and many theatres are mounting productions.

The BBC is broadcasting four film originations, notably the four history plays that cover the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V and a film adaptation of the new RSC production of Julius Caesar to join in those celebrations.

The BBC has also made some factual output across TV, radio and online to add context in the hope of adding to the audience's appreciation of Shakespeare's skill as a writer.

Filming Henry V on location

It's been 400 years since Shakespeare was writing and we wanted to explore what makes his work stand out. Why does everyone still know about him after all this time? Many of his tales are about universal human preoccupations - love, death, power, corruption. Many of us know something at least about his plays but he does have a reputation for being hard work and difficult to understand.

We hope that with greater understanding of the history and of how his plays work, then people will get more out of it. We want this season to bring Shakespeare alive to a modern audience and celebrate his work.

What are you hoping the season will achieve?

I'm hoping it will show people just how rewarding Shakespeare can be. Yes the language is tough but it's well worth sticking with it. I wanted the season to explore the historical context in which Shakespeare was writing and also celebrate his language and try and understand what made him just so incredibly good at capturing all it means to be human.

James Shapiro presents The King and the Playwright: A Jacobean History

We're kicking off the season this April with a look at the historical context in which Shakespeare was writing. We want to bring his times alive and explore why he told the stories he did. On BBC Four, historian James Shapiro examines the second half of Shakespeare's career - the dark and turbulent times during which he wrote some of his most powerful plays (The King and the Playwright: A Jacobean History) . Meanwhile, on BBC Two Francesco da Mosto visits some of the spectacular locations in Italy that fired Shakespeare's imagination (Shakespeare in Italy, BBC Two).

I also wanted to look at how the language Shakespeare used works and what makes it so special. Many children study Shakespeare's texts in school. When you hear the words aloud the sense is more immediately evident - it really helps bring Shakespeare alive. Off by Heart is a competition for secondary school children that opens up the language of Shakespeare to a new and younger audience. I was there for the final and it was deeply moving to see young people putting new life into Shakespeare's language with such understanding and passion.

Off By Heart

Later on in June, Simon Schama argues that it is impossible to understand how Shakespeare came to belong "to all time", without understanding just how much he was a product of the time he was writing (Shakespeare and Us, BBC Two). And you can't do much better than have Oscar-winning Director Sam Mendes at the helm in four new adaptations of Shakespeare's history plays.

You've worked with the RSC and the British Museum. What do you think these partnerships have brought to the season?

These partnerships have proved to be incredibly fertile. Bringing Shakespeare to the screen is very different to a stage adaptation and I think we've really learnt from each other.

The RSC have brought their depth of understanding of Shakespeare and, through their actors, have made the language come alive visually for a modern audience. Shakespeare Unlocked, the online digital resource we've produced together with BBC Learning, will be a great legacy for the future.

When it comes to the British Museum, we have of course already worked with Neil McGregor on his History of the World series. It's been great to build on the success of that series with Neil bringing his incredible insight and knowledge to the season by exploring some of the objects from the turbulent period during which Shakespeare was writing (Shakespeare's Restless World, BBC Radio 4).

What these partnerships give us is great expertise, access to different and often deeper knowledge of the subject and a new perspective. And it gives us the chance to encourage our audience to go and visit an exhibition or a see a play on stage. The combined force of a single season like this is greater than the sum of its parts and very exciting.

Julius Caesar offers to take an innovative approach to bringing the live experience to viewers. How do you aim to do this?

Julius Caesar is one of the plays that feels most politically relevant, particularly if you think about what events in Libya over the last year or what has been happening in Mali now. I think it's a really innovative and brave idea to set a modern Julius Caesar in an African state and will create something very fresh and thought provoking for viewers. With the RSC taking such a radical approach it seemed only right that we try and do something just as experimental in the way that we bring the performance to the screen.

The production team have found an amazing disused shopping centre in North London and are busy turning this into the set for our African state. We're filming some of the scenes there and combining them with footage from one of the stage performances. I'm very excited about this new way of bringing theatre to television and I hope it will really energise viewers and bring the performance alive for them.

I hope that they'll think we've stayed true to Shakespeare and that we've conveyed some sense of the real wonder of his language and ideas - there's a reason why Shakespeare continues to be the world's greatest playwright nearly 400 years after his death.

The BBC has an opportunity to reach a really broad audience and I hope that by the end of the season we'll have gone some way to explaining why it is that the themes and ideas that Shakespeare explored resonate now just as clearly as they did when he first wrote his plays.

• Read more about the programmes in the Shakespeare season on the BBC Media Centre website.
• The Shakespeare season is part of the London 2012 Festival and The Cultural Olympiad on the BBC.

Books have accompanied me round a lot of the turns my life has taken.

When I look back over the literary landmarks of my life as a reader I see a crowd of characters – James Bond, Humbert Humbert, Mr Micawber, Macon ‘Milkman’ Dead, Philip Marlowe, Nostromo, Becky Sharp, Jude the Obscure and Fernando Ariza. They stay in my memory as characters I have known, as vivid as real people and much more vividly than the plots or places they inhabit. Sebastian Faulks takes this as the central idea in his new BBC Two series, Faulks on Fiction , in which he looks at the way four character types - heroes, villains, lovers and snobs – evolve as the British novel develops. It is a simple idea, and a fresh and original insight into why novels work. Graham Greene meant a lot to me as a teenager – from Travels With My Aunt I moved on to the thrillers (Gun for Sale, Stamboul Train) before tackling A Burnt Out Case and The End of The Affair – Maurice Bendrix features in the series as a dreadful warning against self-absorption and jealousy. Alongside Humbert Humbert he is one of the great anti-lovers in 20th Century fiction.

My first real job was in a bookshop, selling bibles and history books in Piccadilly. The shop assistants were actively encouraged to borrow books from the shop floor (providing we wrapped the covers in paper to stop them getting scuffed on the bus) so as to be knowledgeable when it came to advising to the dauntingly grand and well-heeled customers. I confess that a lot of my borrowing was from the new fiction section, but noone seemed to mind. It was a stepping stone to a job in publishing, first as receptionist and reader of the ‘slush pile’ of unsolicited manuscripts in a literary agency then as a junior editor at Chatto & Windus. I was proud to be working at the place that published Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley and Proust, as well as A S Byatt and Toni Morrison (her books including Song of Solomon and Beloved had a profound effect on me) and I was there when Angela Carter published Wise Children, a hymn to South London and rackety lives. Later on I was privileged to help her put together her final collections of prose (she called me her amanuensis) during her last illness.

I got in to television because of books, as a publisher-turned-researcher on a teatime show called The Bookworm – in which Griff Rhys Jones went exploring Hardy’s Wessex and Jemima Puddleduck’s Lake District. I then went on to develop a series on BBC Two called An Awfully Big Adventure about the century of children’s writers stretching from E Nesbit and Kenneth Grahame to Roald Dahl and Dr Seuss.

I am lucky enough to work around books – but they still provide the quickest place of escape. The first book to transport me and my imagination was Ferdinand - the life-affirming story of a peace-loving bull who as a result of an accident with a bumblebee ends up in the bullring in Madrid. Decades later I went on holiday to Spain and had a jolt when I recognised Ronda's gorge and bridge from  the illustrations – I was actually in Ferdinand’s hometown! I worked my way through Watership Down and the writings of Gerald Durrell and James Herriot, then James Bond, Daphne du Maurier and John Buchan. I was voracious and fairly undiscrimating reader and would find an author I liked and read everything of theirs that I could get hold of, be it PG Wodehouse, Damon Runyon, John le Carre or Wilbur Smith. 

A great novel is like a present from a novelist to the reader’s imagination – and the gift of a carefully-chosen book is something to be treasured which is why I am thrilled the BBC is partnering with World Book Night for the first ever event on March 5th. The BBC is the biggest producer of books programming across radio and television and  this year I have been lucky enough to have been able to continue this tradition by adding to it with some exciting new commissions. Last night we launched a season Free your Imagination - Books on the BBC in a room in Bloomsbury which is suitably named after Virginia Woolf. For me this special year of Books on the BBC feels timely, amidst the debate about the rise of the e-book and the future of the book as physical object. It is really about what is in them. I really hope Books on the BBC will encourage everyone to enjoy books in all their forms; through adaptations, radio plays, documentaries, discussion, debate, recommendation and reading.

Books enrich my mind, load my luggage, and furnish my rooms, stairs and most available surfaces...

Mark Bell is Commissioning Editor, Arts

Modern Writers: interviews with remarkable authors - BBC Archive collection

This weekend the Roundhouse in Camden was the venue for this year's RIBA Stirling Prize, and The Culture Show's Tom Dyckhoff was joined by Kevin McCloud to host proceedings. It is the Oscars of architecture. It may lack the film-stars and frocks - but my hopes on reading the invitation (the dress-code was 'Smart and Stylish' ) were fulfilled by a fine display of modern spectacles and deconstructed suits. Tom went through the keyhole of all the shortlisted buildings and gave us the lowdown and Kevin was on hand as the winner was announced live on Saturday night on BBC Two.

This year's coverage was special: not only was the Culture Show broadcasting live from the Prize for the first time; two schools made it onto the shortlist as never before, but Zaha Hadid won for her design of Rome's MAXXI gallery. She was clad in an architectural yellow tube to collect the award and gave a generous and heartfelt acceptance speech. It was a good year for public buildings and Hadid's first award in Britain.

Hot on the heels of the accolade for the best new building by a British architect comes the Man Booker Prize. Tim Samuels has gone back to Comrie in Perthshire (and why not) to get the residents to read the shortlist and choose who in their opinion should get this year's gong. Next Friday the Review Show will see what their regular critics make of the shortlist, and the winner will be announced live on the 10 o'clock news on the 12th October - can Peter Carey make it a hattrick with Parrot and Olivier in America - which seemed to win over Andrew Graham Dixon when he interviewed the author in February.

It seems like no time at all since Frieze Art Fair first started - but it has quickly become a draw for the bigwigs of the international art scene and a hot date in the contemporary art calendar. In that week the Culture Show will present a contemporary art special, fronted by Grayson Perry, we will be looking at the work of controversial Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei and trying work out what Simon Fujiwara is saying about art and commerce with the archeological remains he has smuggled in to the art fair.

BBC Four celebrates world cinema by broadcasting some of the best new titles, all of which deserve wider recognition. It also hosts the World Cinema Awards. This year promises to be a vintage WCA with two of my favourite movies - Let The Right One In - a remarkable tender and atmospheric Scandinavian vampire movie (the Hollywood version is about to come out) and A Prophet - an extraordinarily tough contemporary French prison drama. Both of them have stand-out central performances. And Lifetime Achievement Award at the ceremony is going to the legendary Bernardo Bertolucci whose work spans half a century and an amazing range of styles from Last Tango in Paris to The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky.

And look out for a big season celebrating books and reading in the New Year, centred around Sebastian Faulks' new series on BBC Two. In using major programme seasons from Poetry and Opera to Proms and the Novel, alongside our regular programmes, we reach millions of people every week. Culture is at the heart of the BBC's output, and our aim to take the arts seriously across all our channels and appeal to the widest possible audience.

Mark Bell is the BBC's Commissioning Editor for Arts

Radio 2 announces new arts initiatives in October.

• Editor's note - the Media Festival Arts brings the arts, film and media industries together to discuss potential for commercial and creative collaboration in the digital sphere. Mark Bell will be speaking alongside BBC Director General Mark Thompson, BBC Creative Director Alan Yentob, BBC Head of Archive Roly Keating and Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. It began on Wednesday and runs until Friday. For full details, visit www.themediafestivalarts.com

• There is more information about the BBC Academy and Arts Council England's new digital skill sharing initiative on the Press Office website