Daisy Goodwin: 'I'm not the new Nigella'

It's a bit of a revelation for me to see Daisy Goodwin pacing round her office, taking meetings, surrounded by deferential staff and busy producers. Not because I don't think Daisy does all this, being the new editorial director of Talkback Productions, in charge of a hefty wedge of the UK's entertainment and lifestyle programming. But she is also an old friend, and seeing old friends in new settings is always a surprise.

Putting old friends in new settings is precisely what Daisy does herself this week when she presents a "visual anthology" of poetry on BBC2. In a series that aims to reawaken the nation's appetite for poetry, familiar pieces are packaged as lavishly filmed mini-dramas, with modern settings designed to give the old favourites a fresh slant. Impressively cast and wittily conceived, there is Amanda Holden as a wry teacher reading Wendy Cope's "Bloody Men" to a class of girls; Damien Lewis as a predatory office flirt seducing a girl at the photocopier with Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"; and others, including Liza Tarbuck, Prunella Scales, Alison Steadman, Sam West and Ralph Little, bringing to life an assortment of poems on the themes of first love, parenthood, families and sex. In her on-screen debut, Daisy proves triumphantly telegenic as she drifts gravel-voiced round a kitchen, or glides through a soft-focus Shepherd's Bush with her two-year-old daughter beside her.

Her role as poetry evangelist began in print with a range of anthologies with titles such as 101 Poems to Keep You Sane and 101 Poems to Get You through the Night, which, however much she disputes the idea, established an ingenious new publishing niche – Self-Help Poetry. "I would never describe poetry as self-help," she insists. "It's something far more rich and strange. On the other hand, great poetry contains great emotional truth, and I think that's always helpful. If you can expose people to great poetry and it might help them, then what's the problem?

"There's always been a hunger for poetry, but the middle market – the sort of people who used to buy Palgrave's Golden Treasury – have been ignored by publishers and editors. There's an audience out there hungry for serious content, who don't want to be patronised, but nor do they want to be confused by obscure artistic debate."

The idea of putting poetry on screen came to Jane Root, the BBC2 controller, as she was reading one of Daisy's anthologies. "I was wondering why we had never found a way of doing poems on television," Root recalls. "Poetry is always represented through the history and the biography of poets, rather than the pure wonderfulness of the poems themselves. Then, in a flash, I thought, 'If we could put actors in modern dress, it could work.' "

Even then, it didn't occur to her to use Daisy as a presenter until Daisy suggested it. "It's true that when it's someone who's worked in television, you simply don't think about them as a presenter," says Root. "But now I'd say she has a great future on screen because she has a combination of looking both good and ferociously intelligent."

A bit of ferocity certainly emerged in the transition from behind the camera to in front, Daisy concedes. "Being on the other side of the camera is weird. You've got two links outside, and it's minus 15, and they're all dressed up in parkas and hats, and I'm standing around in a T-shirt getting colder and colder, and they're saying, 'Can we just do it one more time?' Of course, for me, unlike others, I really know it's not going to work – they're not going to use it – and I do that thing that I used to hate presenters doing, of saying, 'Well, I'll do it if you want, but it's not going to work.' I am actually very, very hard to work with."

After starting out as a BBC production trainee, Daisy gravitated toward arts programming, working on Omnibus and Bookmark, and going on to produce The Nation's Favourite Poem. But a few years ago she rejected the offer of head of arts at the BBC in favour of life outside the corporation. "I've done all that sitting in meetings and reviews, and the whole thing where someone didn't like your last programme so you do nothing for a year," she says. "Now, if they don't like something, you can go to another channel. And I have a much nicer office."

Once out of the BBC, she began to develop a range of programmes including House Doctor, Life Laundry, Property Ladder, Your Money or Your Life and, most recently, Jamie's Kitchen, which are all rooted in a central concept – that ordinary people can transform their lives. Root sees a direct connection between Daisy's user-friendly approach to poetry and this "can do" treatment of design, cookery and financial management. "Daisy was the first person to do a programme on interior design, when she did Home Front for BBC2. She understood the thoughtfulness and sophistication that people put into the way their homes look. She completely caught the moment."

Essential Poems is a family affair. Both Daisy's daughters appear – "I had to put Ottie in, because her rabbit had died and she was depressed" – and Daisy's father, the film producer Richard Goodwin, came on location. For good measure, much of the filming was done at the home of her mother, Jocasta Innes, also a TV presenter. Yet despite the family tradition, Daisy claims a certain ambivalence about continuing on screen. She has a few further presenting commissions lined up, including a programme about Byron, but murmurs: "I've no idea how I'll come across – some posh bird lecturing about poems, probably."

Indeed, her brunette beauty-and-brains combo has brought inevitable comparisons with Nigella, but she's not at all keen on that. "I'm so not the next Nigella. I've got a fabulous job which right now I want to get on with." And eventually? "Eventually I'd quite like to be controller of BBC2."

'Essential Poems (to fall in love with)' begins at 7.30pm, Friday, BBC2