My goal is simply to push the best writers I know. I feel deeply that everyone – builders, bankers, biologists and bus conductors - need to read Shakespeare and Dickens, Hemingway and Dickinson. These people are not preachers - they have no creed. They just try to reflect the human condition in the best way they can.

The greatest troubles in our world come from uneducated people - those who don't know themselves and are insensitive to others. It seems to me that our authors are the only people who can help us in this area. Read a few novels by George Eliot, a few plays by Shakespeare, Tender is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald and you will never be quite the same again. So that's the raison d'etre of Academy Media.

I must have got a few things right: The British Museum used my Keats programme as the centrepiece of an exhibition on the Poet. The Dickens House Museum on Doughty Street in London has our Dickens film showing all the time. Our programmes on Goethe and Kafka are shown in German schools in a German language version. The programme on Edgar Allan Poe is our best seller in schools and colleges across the United States.

Of course I've done Burns and Stevenson and Walter Scott and I live in hope that education in Scotland might notice. Alas, not so far. However we press on, with a programme on Adam Smith planned later this year.

I am equally enthusiastic about music, so the Beethoven House in Bonn sells our Beethoven programme from our Famous Composers series - in English and German. Last year we issued Mahler and this year Chopin. (2010 is the bi-centenary of his birth.)

Asia has always been a special interest and we have a couple of programmes on Thai history currently being updated, with a programme on Thai dance in the making. Last year we added Confucius to the Famous Authors series. And our major product this year is a 5 x 50 minute TV series (also on DVD for download) called In the Shadow of Mr Kong - the influence of Confucius on the history and culture of China. There it all is in writing, porcelain, emperors, writers, scientists and everything you've always wanted to know about China and above all why, with such a splendid start, it all ended up in such an awful mess. This has been more than 3 years in the making, rooted in a lifetime experience of Asia and filmmaking. We are hopeful it will hit world TV channels and be downloaded into countless homes. It's a fascinating subject and we can’t be ignorant about it. China may be looked on as the current economic miracle and much feared; it is a great deal more than that and needs understanding and welcoming.