Portal:BBC
The BBC Portal
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current state with its current name on New Year's Day 1927. The oldest and largest local and global broadcaster by stature and by number of employees, the BBC employs over 21,000 staff in total, of whom approximately 17,900 are in public-sector broadcasting.
The BBC was established under a royal charter, and operates under an agreement with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee which is charged to all British households, companies, and organisations using any type of equipment to receive or record live television broadcasts or to use the BBC's streaming service, iPlayer. The fee is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament, and is used to fund the BBC's radio, TV, and online services covering the nations and regions of the UK. Since 1 April 2014, it has also funded the BBC World Service (launched in 1932 as the BBC Empire Service), which broadcasts in 28 languages and provides comprehensive TV, radio, and online services in Arabic and Persian.
Some of the BBC's revenue comes from its commercial subsidiary BBC Studios (formerly BBC Worldwide), which sells BBC programmes and services internationally and also distributes the BBC's international 24-hour English-language news services BBC News, and from BBC.com, provided by BBC Global News Ltd. In 2009, the company was awarded the Queen's Award for Enterprise in recognition of its international achievements in business. (Full article...)
Selected article
Madhouse on Castle Street is a British television play, broadcast by BBC Television on the evening of 13 January 1963, as part of the Sunday Night Play strand. It was written by Evan Jones and directed by Philip Saville. The production featured the young American folk music singer Bob Dylan, who soon became a major musical star.
The play was made with electronic video cameras, although recorded onto film rather than tape. The only known copy of the play was junked in 1968, as was the standard practice of the time, despite the fact that Dylan and lead actor David Warner were by then famous. Although extensive searches have been made by the BBC, only partial audio recordings of four songs sung by Dylan survive. (Full article...)Selected image
Graeme Garden, Barry Cryer and Alison Steadman (left-to-right) during a recording of the BBC Radio 4 programme You'll Have Had Your Tea: The Doings of Hamish and Dougal.
Selected list article
The British documentary series Chartjackers ran for a single season of eleven weekly episodes during the autumn of 2009. The series documents the lives of four teenage video bloggers—Alex Day, Johnny Haggart, Jimmy Hill, and Charlie McDonnell—from the video-sharing website YouTube as they attempt to write, record and release a pop song by crowdsourcing through social media in ten weeks. When initially aired, the first ten episodes of Chartjackers, each five minutes in length, detailed the events of the previous seven days. The final episode, broadcast on 21 November 2009, compiled highlights from the previous ten weeks into one 30-minute episode, which was narrated by British DJ MistaJam. All eleven episodes were produced by Adam King and Jonathan Davenport of the production company Hat Trick Productions.
Chartjackers was devised in 2009 by Davenport and Andy Mettam of Hat Trick Productions, and was commissioned for development by Geoffrey Goodwin and Jo Twist of BBC Switch. Alongside the programmes Off the Hook and The Cut, it was featured as part of a season of multi-platform content designed to appeal to teenagers. The show was also directly linked to the 2009 annual appeal for the British charity Children in Need – profits from sales of the completed pop song were donated to the charity. Chartjackers aired weekly at approximately 1:10 p.m. on Saturday afternoons on BBC Two, with the first episode premiering on 12 September 2009 during the channel's two-hour long BBC Switch segment. The series garnered a viewing figures peak of almost half a million with its final episode and was critically panned by reviewers. Each episode was streamed online through BBC iPlayer to UK residents for seven days after its initial airing. The series was not broadcast outside the UK and, , is not available to buy on DVD. (Full article...)Related portals
Selected biography
Mark Warwick Fordham Speight (6 August 1965 – 7 April 2008) was an English television presenter and host of children's art programme SMart. Speight was born in Seisdon, Staffordshire, and left school at 16 to become a cartoonist. He took a degree in commercial and graphic art and, while working in television set construction, heard of auditions for a new children's art programme. Speight was successful in his audition and became one of the first presenters of SMart, working on it for 14 years.
Speight was also a presenter on See It Saw It, where he met his future fiancée, actress and model Natasha Collins. He took part in live events, such as Rolf on Art and his own Speight of the Art workshops for children. He was involved in charity work; he became the president of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign's Young Pavement Artists Competition, and was a spokesperson for ChildLine. (Full article...)Selected building
The Egton Wing of Broadcasting House was completed in 2005 on the site of Egton House. A memorial sculpture, Breathing, for those killed whilst reporting on wars is situated on the roof.
Did you know
Highlights from Wikipedia's Did you know
- ... that the first series of British radio stand-up comedy show Mark Steel's in Town was recorded in Skipton, Boston, Lewes, Walsall, Merthyr Tydfil and the Isle of Portland?
- ... that the episodes of the BBC 7 sitcom Knocker have titles such as "Privinvasionacy", "Obselejectivitysence" and "Confidentialitydence"?
- ... that Matt Kirshen's Bigipedia article on the "Bee Whisperer" was inspired by an article found using the random article function on Wikipedia?
- ... that the BBC journalist Barbara Plett's admission of having cried at the sight of the terminally ill Yasser Arafat led to a controversy?
- ... that crime novelist P. D. James listed the 2007 series Help Me Anthea, I'm Infested as one of the most embarrassing television programmes the BBC has ever produced?
- ... that BBC radio broadcaster Venu Chitale taught listeners how to cook without meat when it was rationed during the Second World War?
- ... that after being wiped by the BBC, all four episodes of the Doctor Who serial The Time Meddler were discovered in Nigeria in 1984?
- ... that the first song played on That's 60s was the same song Tony Blackburn had played on BBC Radio 1 more than 55 years earlier?
- ... that South African physician Tlaleng Mofokeng is the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health, and was named one of the BBC's 100 Women?
BBC topics
| Services | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Management | |||||||||
| Departments | |||||||||
| Nations and regions |
| ||||||||
| Commercial subsidiaries | |||||||||
| History | |||||||||
| Key properties (full list) |
| ||||||||
| Finance | |||||||||
| Projects | |||||||||
| Technical | |||||||||
| UK channels | |
|---|---|
| UK nations and regions | |
| Services and programming blocks | |
| UKTV channels | |
| International channels and joint ventures | |
| Defunct channels |
|
| UK stations | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| International stations | |||||||
Defunct stations and services |
| ||||||
| Related topics | |||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
| Programmes |
| ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Other | |||||||||||||||
.svg) |
| ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Categories
WikiProjects
This portal is maintained by members of WikiProject BBC, in particular those listed on the Portal Maintenance page.
To join the project, please add your username to the list of members.
| WikiProject BBC Navigation |
|---|
| Main page | WikiProject talk | Assessment | Requests | Templates BBC Portal (Maintenance) | Radio task force | Sitcoms task force |
Associated Wikimedia
The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:
-
Commons
Free media repository -
Wikibooks
Free textbooks and manuals -
Wikidata
Free knowledge base -
Wikinews
Free-content news -
Wikiquote
Collection of quotations -
Wikisource
Free-content library -
Wikiversity
Free learning tools -
Wiktionary
Dictionary and thesaurus
