Danny Cohen: 'TV panel shows without women are unacceptable'

Danny Cohen might have a big job – he is director of television at the BBC, and so responsible for every TV channel plus iPlayer and BBC Films – but his office is about the size of a garden shed. Yes, it's high in the new Broadcasting House, and in a corner, so it comes with plenty of light and lovely rooftop views. But, were you to swing a cat in it (something that would obviously contravene the BBC's no doubt extensive health and safety rules), things would rapidly become very messy. There are three of us here today – me, him and the inevitable minder – and it's, well, cosy. It's also, from my point of view, disappointing. The Daily Mail loves to have a go at Cohen, whom it regards as some kind of liberal, yoof-obsessed, ratings-obsessed, jargon-spouting, profligate fat cat – it once ran an (untrue) story insisting that he breakfasts daily on caviar omelettes at the swanky Piccadilly restaurant the Wolseley – so I was expecting a penthouse suite at least.

"Yes, well... welcome to the BBC," says Cohen. "I did an interview with the Hollywood Reporter earlier in the year and when the photographer came, he said, 'Can you take me to your real office now?' We had to explain that this really is my working space: value for money, you see." I take a surreptitious look around, hoping to spot a yoga mat or one of those management manuals called something like Who Moved My Juicer? But, no. Only a football (Cohen is a Liverpool fan, a legacy of his Scottish father) and, stuck to a glass wall, a poster of Dickens' Dream, the famous Victorian watercolour by Robert William Buss. Cohen loves Dickens; if he'd stayed on at Oxford to do a PhD, an idea he toyed with for a while, his thesis would have been about the Victorian novel. "This is my favourite picture," he says, twisting to look at it. "All his characters are there." (Dickens is asleep at his desk, while above him float Pickwick and all the rest.) Why didn't he stay on at Oxford? "In the end, I thought, I can keep on reading anyway. Also, none of the post-graduates looked particularly happy to me."

I decided I wanted to interview Cohen when I read, last year, that he was on a mission to encourage all his senior staff to go back to the floor, to get out of their offices and work as runners, grips, assistants, whatever. What intrigued me was that he was promising to do this himself. It seemed that he was going to work on Strictly Come Dancing. So did it happen? "Yes, it did." What was it like? "It was fun. I got quite nervous at some points. I spent an afternoon putting sequins on to a coat with glue and a little wooden rod. I'm not amazingly practical. I thought, am I going to make a mess of this?" But did the experience teach him anything? "Yes. What I don't want to be is someone who runs BBC television from an office. It reminded me what it's like to be making things, of the pressure of live television. We ask people from their early 20s onwards to do that job, and I don't want to be separated from how it feels." Have others followed him? "Most of my senior team have done it now. The controller of BBC1 helped out in catering on location for a day."

Cohen, who is 40, has been in his current job since last April (he was previously controller of BBC1 and, before that, of BBC3) and has already taken the opportunity to say several wise things about creativity (he'd like to see more of it) and the ungrateful tendency of some stars to slag off the BBC in press interviews (he named no names, but an example would be Jennifer Saunders, who described the organisation that made her famous as "an executive-run place for idiots").

But still, I wonder how it feels no longer to be commissioning programmes. After all, it's Cohen we can blame (or worship) for such shows as Call the Midwife, The Village, Last Tango in Halifax and more. Isn't his life now just one long meeting? "Yes, there are a lot of meetings. But I wouldn't say for a second that my job's not interesting. I don't miss commissioning and the reason why is that I no longer have to say no 40 times a day. The truth is that the amount of programmes that get pitched and the money available to make those programmes is 100 to one. So you say no 50 times for every yes." This, he thinks, is something the public tends to forget. Every channel must run a one in, one out policy when it comes to commissioning. Ripper Street, axed after two series, was a victim of this necessary ruthlessness (whatever its fans claim, it "wasn't doing brilliantly", though he liked it a lot).

When I interviewed one of Cohen's senior colleagues, he left me with the impression that he didn't watch much television: I wasn't sure he even particularly liked it. Cohen is not like this. "I love television; I always have. When I was small, I watched from when I got home from school until children's programmes ended at 6pm. I had a television in my room at university because I couldn't imagine being without one."

So what does he like now? "A lot of football and cricket; that's relaxing for me because I don't start thinking about how it's made. The Wrong Mans [a BBC2 comedy-drama starring James Corden] was incredible, and Peaky Blinders [gangs of Birmingham, with Cillian Murphy in a Bugsy Malone cap]. I love EastEnders, and I think it's coming back to form, and I've always liked Downton." Really? I hate it. "Well, the Christmas special wasn't their best show..." Believe me when I tell you that he doesn't look even the tiniest bit embarrassed by this confession.

What does the BBC need more of? "We need to keep introducing new people on screen with new perspectives; we need to take people to different parts of the world." It seems to me that some series do not get the time they need to grow, with the result that they're either killed before they start truly to work or – the adorable Last Tango in Halifax might be an example of this – the anxious writer throws too much into the first two series and so winds up in a narrative cul-de-sac (when you've done everything, where else to go?). But he disagrees. "There is a grass-is-always-greener thing here. In America, series are made in 13 or 24 parts for commercial reasons. I think we should do series of different lengths. If you went into a bookshop and asked the owner to recommend a good novel, it would be a bit strange if he said, 'We've got novels in two different lengths, sir: 200 words and 400 words. Which would you like?' You want a story to be the length it needs to be."

Is the BBC ratings obsessed? No. "There are niche programmes every night on BBC2 and BBC4. But I don't want to make lots of programmes that people don't watch. That's not responsible. I don't like it." Would he explain to me the success of Mrs Brown's Boys, watched by 9.4 million on Christmas Day? "Yes. There are huge numbers of people – and I'm one – who love studio-based sitcoms. The joy in the room!" Again, I peer at him, trying to work out if he's being sincere. Oh, Lord. I think he is.

The son of a criminal lawyer, Cohen was the first person in his family to go to university (his father, who began his working life as an insurance clerk, went to night school to qualify). "My family is neither artistic nor wealthy," he says (though he was privately educated in London). After Oxford, there was a brief stint when he worked as a tour manager for the Alarm, his favourite band – yes, really! he also used to help to organise their fan conventions – and then he got a job as a researcher at Channel 4, after which, one thing led to another. He was part of the launch team at E4, a channel he went on to run (he commissioned The Inbetweeners).

He then left to run BBC3 – for the record, he did not commission Fuck Off I'm a Hairy Woman and several other equally grim-sounding shows; he axed them – at which point someone began writing a spoof blog apparently inspired by him: the Secret Blog of a TV Controller (aged 36 and a bit). "Oh my God," he groans, when I bring this up. "It started soon after I arrived at BBC3 and I was new, and for a day or two it made me feel uncomfortable because people didn't know me. I wondered whether they'd get the right impression. But quite quickly I thought: who is this person who's got time to do this? It felt toxic, but you can't let these things get to you."

He has learned not to take the newspapers too seriously either. "My wife [Noreena Hertz, the academic and campaigner] wrote a book, and on the jacket she had the temerity to wear a mini-skirt. Half the reviews were about that. She's good at reminding me to disconnect from that stuff."From BBC3, he moved to BBC1. Was he terrified? "No. It was exciting. I would think, one in six people will watch this if I put it on." From the outside, his career has been so smooth, so seamless. Does he want to be director general? All he'll say is that he wouldn't mind living in New York one day – and then he's reeling off a list of delights to come (adaptations ofJK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, a new natural history series called Survival and a new writing slot to be directed by Dominic Savage).

This isn't an easy period for the BBC. Its royal charter is due for renewal in 2016; it must try harder to deal with the issues around the salaries of its stars and its top-heavy management structure (though Cohen believes some mythology surrounds the latter: "Ben [Stephenson, controller of commissioning at BBC drama] has three people in his team; there isn't an army sitting up there"). It must also do something about its image among older female viewers who'd like to see more of their peers on screen. "We're getting better," he tells me, citing the inevitable example of Mary Beard. "But we need to get better." The BBC Trust has already told management it must get more women on to its panel shows, but now he startles me by saying: "We're not going to have panel shows on any more with no women on them. You can't do that. It's not acceptable." Remember: you heard it here first.

Most of all, though, there is the on-going fallout from the Savile scandal. "Last year was grim," he says. "It was horrifying to find out those things. It was upsetting. Though we shouldn't feel sorry for ourselves. We're not the victims." Will there come a moment when a line may be drawn under this period? It seems unlikely in the immediate future. "You don't know how much more is out there. But, if people do feel able to speak out, that can only be a good thing." This is the first time he has sounded uncertain.

We go downstairs to the studio of The One Show, where he is to be photographed. Like his office, it's tiny; minus its presenters and guests, it feels about as glamorous as a hair salon and twice as cramped. Cohen, though, sits on the sofa with aplomb, his body language as perky as that of any celebrity with a book to plug. While he poses, my minder tells me how nice he is to work for, a statement I'm inclined to believe given how often such people carefully say nothing at all about their bosses (a semaphore I've learned to read). Oh, I'm sure he can be as daft as the next bloke sometimes. There was a point when he began to say: "We are on the same page…" before suddenly stopping himself. But he also strikes me as clever and decent. Either that or I just find it impossible not to like someone who loves both Dickens and Last Tango in Halifax.