New chapter in BBC drive to popularise culture

The hunt for the greatest Briton is to be followed by the search for the nation's best-loved books.

The Big Read on BBC2 will ask the public to vote for their favourite book, culminating in a top 10 debate with star names championing the literary rivals. The winner might be dramatised as a BBC serial.

Jane Root, the controller of BBC2, said the event would be "Britain's biggest ever celebration of the joy and magic of reading literature" and would aim to get people talking about books as the chat show hostess Oprah Winfrey did in America.

Through the internet, radio and television, the BBC will help viewers to form reading groups to discuss the books in contention.

Ms Root said yesterday: "Great Britons has shown us that viewers can be just as passionate about big-scale factual events as they can be about entertainment formats ... I think viewers will be just as enthused by a programme about literature."

Ms Root denied that the BBC was resorting to game show-style formats to put books on screen, adding: "Oprah Winfrey's book groups have turned reading into something massively popular. I believe we can do something similar with this." She named Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller as her favourites.

After years in which publishers and readers have lamented the dearth of book shows on television, BBC2's decision to find new ways of covering literature is likely to be welcomed.

The channel is planning a week-long series of programmes on poetry to mark Valentine's Day. Actors including Christopher Lee, Sinead Cusack and Prunella Scales will act out love poetry, such as Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress and Shakespearean sonnets, in contemporary settings. Individual poems will be slotted between programmes in addition to five half-hour shows under the title Essential Poems (To Fall In Love With), presented by Daisy Goodwin, who worked on the BBC's hunt for the nation's favourite poem.

Novice poets can also enter a poetry competition where the winner will see his or her poem performed and published. Voting for The Big Read will begin in March and the hunt will culminate in the autumn.

TOP TEN SUGGESTED BY BOYD TONKIN, 'INDEPENDENT' LITERARY EDITOR

The Odyssey, by Homer

An epic poem, but also a matchless novel of marvels and adventures that set the narrative standard for 2,500 years.

The Tale of Genji, by Lady Murasaki,

Written at the Heian court of Japan, c1015, but still the grandmother of all later erotic and psychological fiction.

Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes,

Every modern quest and satire – not to mention comic double-act – dates back to the sad knight and tubby pal.

Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne,

The first, and finest, experimental novel, but also a huge feast of jokes, red herrings and surreal shaggy dog stories.

Emma, by Jane Austen

Social comedy and moral insight exquisitely married by a peerless craftswoman who conquers every generation.

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

The drama, and horror, of growing up among mystifying adults captured with unequalled excitement and insight.

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Humanity's dark night of the soul explored with courage and compassion by the genius who made his own rules.

Ulysses, by James Joyce

Using plot from The Odyssey, the whole of the emerging 20th-century is compressed into one comic, fateful day in Dublin, 1904.

The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald

In which the vast invention of America reduces to a jewelled tale of lies, love and loss. A world in miniature.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez,

The Earth's formerly silent cultures find their voice in this exuberant mythic history of oppression and liberation.