Steve Jenkins can’t afford to take his job lightly. As senior editor, films at BBC Acquisitions, a division of BBC Broadcast, he is responsible for securing the u.k. rights to television serials (reruns), soap operas, Hollywood blockbusters, u.s. golden oldies and foreign-language films that are watched by up to 15 million entertainment-hungry viewers of BBC1 and BBC2.

The sheer monster mass of critical television channel surfers means there are hundreds if not thousands of different appetites to satisfy.

So Jenkins picks up a challenging and eclectic mix of programming. In any one week, BBC1 and BBC2 will air 25 feature films, which most likely were purchased and stashed in the library years ago.

Coming to the Toronto International Film Festival for the third year, Jenkins feels rather relaxed about his job and casually admits, ‘I don’t have a budget. You see, we don’t have a fixed amount we can spend because we’re buying for so many years ahead we balance out the returns later. At this stage we just try to evaluate the worth of a film for us.’

He says BBC Acquisitions will pay anywhere from £15,000 to several million pounds to snag exclusive u.k. television rights to a film or a package of reruns from a major studio. He will also acquire pay-tv, satellite and cable-tv rights and sell them on too.

Recently, Jenkins purchased DreamWorks’ Deep Impact for eventual television transmission, Shine and Wilde with Stephen Fry, one of those rare acquisitions that was purchased at the script stage.

Some other biggies he’s currently eyeballing include films that were released last year: Wings of the Dove, Gattaca and Washington Square.

How does the Toronto festival figure into all of this? ‘To tell you the truth, it’s unlikely we’ll actually buy anything in TorontoÉit’s possible that a lot of things I see here may already have been acquired by someone else [a theatrical distributor] for the u.k., so I’ll have to pick it up from them later.’

Jenkins says he traditionally buys less at tiff, but likes to meet with producers and distributors to see what’s percolating. Anyway, the hubbub whets the appetite.

‘Toronto really runs the gamut. It offers a wide variety of foreign and independent films, which we really don’t get to see anywhere else,’ he says.

Last year, even before Cannes, he picked up The Sweet Hereafter, L.A. Confidential and Eve’s Bayou. But he’s buying for two very different audiences here. BBC1 airs the big Hollywood films while BBC2 is dedicated to older films, 1930s black-and-white Hollywood films, foreign-language ones and the indies.

Still, Jenkins is reluctant to pinpoint any trends in buying and says he doesn’t really serve a niche market. ‘I know I’m being vague but part of my agenda here is to look for the films you don’t know about yet.’

The films we don’t know about yet are, of course, the independents that Jenkins likes to buy for ‘the small, but appreciative audience’ of BBC2. Its viewers enjoy films like the period piece Umrao Jaan from the Indian subcontinent, which portrays the tragic life of a prostitute during the Mughal period, or La Reine Margot.

While films on BBC2 will attract anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 viewers, BBC1 remains the juggernaut, drawing up to 15 million viewers at Christmas and anywhere from four million to eight million per film at other times.

While in the past few years audiences have been requesting films from the Far East, that wave seems to be subsiding, says Jenkins, adding that European films, in particular, French ones, are sizzling in the u.k. right now.