The BBC's head of religion and ethics has admitted that the corporation's television coverage of Good Friday 2009 "could have been better".

Aaqil Ahmed told the Today programme that BBC "did listen" and that this year's Easter output would include a special from King's College, Cambridge, The Private Life of and Easter Masterpiece and a documentary on the meaning of Good Friday presented by the historian Bettany Hughes.

He was replying to an assertion by Nigel Holmes, a lay member of the General Synod and a former religion producer at BBC Cumbria, that the corporation had "BBC television seemed to ignore the significance" of Good Friday 2009.

Mr Holmes, who praised BBC radio's coverage of religion, has put down a motion to be debated at the synod accusing the corporation's programmes of marginalising Christianity.