Charles Saatchi is giving one of six budding artists a chance to show at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and borrow a London studio for three years. Next week, U.K. television viewers will find out which one.

In “School of Saatchi,” a four-part BBC Two talent contest ending Dec. 14, the collector -- who never appears on the show himself -- will display the winner’s work at his “Newspeak: British Art Now” exhibition currently at the Hermitage. (The work is already showing there anonymously; its creator’s name will be made public after the show has aired.)

“Charles was very keen to do something on TV,” says the Saatchi Gallery’s director of development, Rebecca Wilson, who acts as his proxy on the show.

“There’s a knee-jerk reaction to conceptual art, where people think, ‘My four-year-old can do that,’” Wilson says in a telephone interview. The series gives “a chance to hear the artists” and take viewers behind the creative process.

Saatchi, co-founder of the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency, is the godfather of the so-called Young British Artists who included Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Still busy buying and selling art and scouting new talent, he has exhibited new Middle Eastern, Chinese and American art at his gallery in London’s Chelsea, and lets new artists show work on his Web site.

Like the invisible boss in “Charlie’s Angels,” he stays off the series. The closest you get to seeing him is when his helicopter lands on the grounds of a castle where one workshop is held. He is described as “reclusive” and “camera-shy,” though Matthew Collings, a critic and one of the four judges, says he’s “the least shy person that has ever been born.”

‘Sweet Dreams’

The program’s introduction, narrated to the throbs of the 1983 hit single “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by Eurythmics, bills Saatchi as “one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in the world of modern art,” who has “launched the careers of the world’s most famous contemporary artists: Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst, making them as famous as rock stars.”

Saatchi played an indisputable role in jumpstarting the careers of British-born Hirst and Emin. Yet by the time he showed U.S.-born Koons’s work in his “NY Art Now” London exhibition in 1987, Koons had already been in other group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Stamford, Connecticut (1985), and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (1986).

“We weren’t responsible for the narrative,” says Wilson. “There’s always a sort of ironing out of certain kinds of subtleties that’s inevitable with television.”

Down to Six

Of about 3,000 people who applied to get on the program -- all aged over 18 and none represented by a gallery -- only 12 are left by the start of the first episode. Saatchi himself then whittles them down to six, described by judge Collings as “nice, bright, intelligent, immature artists.”

Based on the footage shown, the judges tend to be fair, and only occasionally blunt in the manner of shows such as “The Apprentice” or “America’s Got Talent.” Rejected submissions include the crumpled printouts of an e-mail exchange between one applicant and artist Martin Creed; a handwritten copy of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”; and a circle of blue chairs lying on one side.

The six finalists stay till the end, rather than getting gradually eliminated.

Development Potential

“The main aim was not for something where every week somebody would get thrown out of the art competition,” says Wilson, who explains that contestants were chosen for their potential to develop over a 10-week period.

The six are asked to make a life drawing of a nude woman, produce an outdoor installation for the beach at Hastings in southern England, and create a work that will be displayed inside Sudeley Castle, the home of the Dent-Brocklehurst family.

One frontrunner is Saad Qureshi, a student of Pakistani descent at the Slade School of Fine Art whose towers of chapati bread on a rug have grabbed Saatchi.

Another whose work has caught Saatchi’s eye is Matt Clark, a graduate of Central St. Martins, who hooked a glass ball filled with a blood-red concoction to the ceiling of Sudeley Castle’s chapel.

Collings says Saatchi’s passion for art and artists is genuine. “I think he wants to put something in,” he says. “He genuinely does want to help.”

“Of course, he also wants to help himself: He’s not a saint,” says Collings, who knows and likes Saatchi. “He wants the public to pay attention to him and take notice of him.”

Based on the show’s viewership, he hasn’t failed at that.