VisionTV has been growing its audience steadily since about 2001 – the year COO Mark Prasuhn and head of programming Chris Johnson came aboard – and hopes are high that more lifestyle and light entertainment programming in its 2005/06 fall season will provide a further boost.

Since their arrival, Vision’s weeknight, primetime audience has jumped 156%, from a per minute average of about 20,000 in 2000/01 to 51,200 in 2004/05. Ratings for last season are also up 18% from the 2003/04 season.

The spiritually themed channel has attracted viewers, says Johnson, through its original lifestyle programs, produced with Ellis Entertainment in a partnership known as VTVI, and with other independent producers. Last year, VTVI’s Devine Restorations proved popular and will return in early September. For this year, the partnership has produced the new six-part series The Lost Gods with U.K.’s Tile Films ­- a travel show that journeys to some of the holiest places on earth. It will debut in 2006.

The six-part Shrines and Homemade Holy Places from Markham Street Films, profiling homemade shrines and shrine-makers, will debut in October. In the new year, Vision will roll out the six-part Gospel Challenge, produced by Riddle Films, an Idol-esque competition featuring amateur gospel choirs, and Recreating Eden, an 11 x 30 program about the roles gardens play in people’s lives from Merit Motion Pictures.

Vision will also air The Naked Archaeologist from Associated Producers, an in-depth look at the biblical secrets and treasures of the Holy Land by filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici (Deadly Currents), debuting Sept. 5 at 9:30 p.m.

On the doc front, Vision will run the Davie Pictures/National Film Board film ScaredSacred, about pilgrimages to various ‘ground zeroes’ around the world, and Captive: The Story of Esther, about the life of the Mother Superior of the Ursuline Convent in the 1700s, from Wheelwright Ink, in October.

‘We don’t deviate from our mandate [with Vision’s lifestyle programs], but we need to be contemporary and that’s the way we’re doing it,’ says Johnson.

A trimmed version of Vision’s flagship current affairs program 360 Vision will return in October with 32 new half-hours on tap and ‘more contemporary, tighter stories,’ he adds.

The non-profit specialty is adding the 1960s series The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and reruns of The Flying Nun to its 4-8 p.m. family block. It already features the syndicated 7th Heaven and Touched by an Angel, and Canadian shows including Twice in a Lifetime and Mysterious Ways. Vision will continue to run movies in primetime on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a new ‘Hollywood Through the Decades’ theme each month, starting with the 1930s and 1940s in October.

Johnson says he is pleased with Vison’s upcoming TV year and the direction the station has moved in since his arrival.

‘If someone had handed me $10 million when I arrived here and told me to fix Vision up right away, we’d probably have been where we are now, only sooner,’ he says.

In 2000, Vision’s primetime lineup was mostly comprised of documentaries – some original, some not – and while it still relies on the programming, it commissions fewer docs and invests in higher-quality programs.

Prasuhn, Johnson and their colleagues have endeavored to ‘professionalize’ the station and gradually rebuilt it with strong original lifestyle and documentary programs, classic movies on Tuesday and Thursday nights – which brought in a per minute average of about 82,000 viewers last season – and a revamped afternoon block, which, according to Johnson, brings a solid 18-34 audience to the station along with Vision’s regulars, largely 50-plus women.

‘It’s about reinvesting in the strengths, introducing new things like the movies, and then focusing on the qualitative improvement of our domestic content,’ says Johnson. ‘Nobody makes allowances because you’re little. It’s television. People can click and you’re gone.’

www.visiontv.ca