| BBC Four | |
|---|---|
| BBC Four logo | |
| Launched | 2 March 2002 |
| Owned by | BBC |
| Picture format | 16:9 SDTV 360p (BBC Online) |
| Audience share | 0.7% (August 2011, BARB) |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Replaced | BBC Knowledge |
| Sister channel(s) | BBC One BBC Two BBC Three BBC News BBC Parliament BBC HD |
| Website | www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/ |
| Availability | |
| Terrestrial | |
| Freeview | Channel 9 |
| Satellite | |
| Freesat | Channel 107 |
| Sky (UK) | Channel 116 |
| Sky (Ireland) | Channel 230 |
| Astra 2D | 10802H 22000 5/6 |
| Cable | |
| Virgin Media | Channel 107 |
| UPC Ireland | Channel 117 |
| Smallworld Cable | Channel 119 |
| UPC Netherlands | Channel 53 |
| Ziggo (Netherlands) | Channel 53 |
| Telenet (Belgium) | Channel 566 |
| IPTV | |
| TalkTalk TV | Channel 20 |
| Internet television | |
| BBC Online | Watch live (UK only) |
| TVCatchup | Watch live (UK only) |
| BBC iPlayer | Watch live (UK only) |
BBC Four is a British television network operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and available to digital television viewers on Freeview, IPTV, satellite and cable.
BBC Four launched on 2 March 2002[1], transmitting a schedule between 19:00 to 4:00. It shows "a wide variety of programmes including drama, documentaries, music, international film, comedy and current affairs ... an alternative to programmes on the mainstream TV channels."[2] It has a schedule dominated by repeats but is required by its licence to broadcast at least 100 hours of new arts and music programmes, 110 hours of new factual programmes and premier 20 international films each year.[3][4]
Contents |
BBC Four launched on 2 March 2002 at 19.00 GMT, having been delayed from the original planned 2001 launch. The channel replaced BBC Knowledge, an educational and cultural channel which had undergone many changes throughout its lifetime; the latter of which consisted of documentaries and art programming: essentially a test of the new BBC Four schedule. BBC Four would rebrand this channel, and bring it into line with the well recognised BBC One and Two brands at the same time. Planning for the new channel, along with the new BBC Three, had been in progress since October 2000; however the incumbent government delayed approving the new BBC digital plans. The BBC Four plans were approved earlier, and as a result launched before BBC Three.
BBC Four was different from the old BBC Knowledge: the channel would be more heavily promoted with more new and original programming and the channel wouldn't be broadcast 24 hours a day. This is due to the fact that on the Freeview digital terrestrial platform, BBC Four is broadcast in a statistically multiplexed stream in Multiplex B that timeshares with the CBeebies channel. As a result, BBC Four broadcasts from 7 pm to about 4 am every day, with an hours down-time and promotions for CBeebies, before CBeebies channel runs from 6 am until 7 pm.
On 12 May 2011, BBC Four was added to the Sky EPG in Ireland on channel 230.[5]
BBC Four forms part of the BBC Vision group, and as a result, the channel controller is answerable to the head of this executive department: George Entwistle, as of 2011. Entwistle himself was acting controller of BBC Four for most of 2007. The channel direction is determined by the channels remit, set by royal charter and the corporation's governing body the BBC Trust, and by the channel controller. These are:
BBC Four has an annual budget of £54.3 million.[3]
BBC Four’s primary role is to reflect a range of UK and international arts, music and culture. It should provide an ambitious range of innovative, high quality programming that is intellectually and culturally enriching, taking an expert and in-depth approach to a wide range of subjects.
— BBC Four Remit
The first evening's BBC Four programmes were simulcast on BBC Two.[1] BBC Four is notable for first showing Larry David's Seinfeld follow-up, Curb Your Enthusiasm,[8] Armando Iannucci's cutting political satire, The Thick of It, The Chaser's War on Everything, Flight of the Conchords, Mad Men and Danish thriller, The Killing.
The channel broadcasts a mixture of art and science documentaries, vintage drama (including many rare black-and-white programmes), and non-English language productions such as films from the Artificial Eye catalogue, the French thriller Spiral and the Swedish detective series Wallander.[9] BBC Four further supports foreign language films with its annual World Cinema Award which has been running since 2004.
On weekdays at 19.00, the channel shows a 30-minute global news programme called World News Today, simulcast with and produced by BBC World News. It screens a number of documentaries such as The Century of the Self and The Trials of Henry Kissinger. The channel is also home to many political travel shows such as Holidays in the Axis of Evil which features investigative journalism.
Drama has given the channel some of its most popular programmes, with The Alan Clark Diaries (2003) and Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa! (2006) being among the highest rated, with over 800,000 viewers. The 18 March 2008, broadcast of The Curse of Steptoe brought the channel its highest audience figures, estimated as 1.41 million viewers, a 7% share of multichannel audiences between 9pm and 10.05pm, based on overnight returns.[10] The official audience figures for the broadcast, including time-shifting, were later published as 1,625,000.[11] Another notable production was a live re-make of the 1953 science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment, adapted from the original scripts into a single, two-hour version (though on the night it in fact underran considerably, lasting less than 1 hour 40 minutes), broadcast on the evening of Saturday 2 April 2005. Discounting BBC Four's previous live relays of theatrical Shakespeare productions, this was the first live made-for-television drama to be broadcast by the BBC for twenty years.
Another notable programme broadcast on BBC Four is Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe which contains reviews of current shows, as well as stories and commentary on how television is produced. The show is presented by broadcaster Charlie Brooker.
Some output from BBC Four (documentaries rather than foreign films) was for a time repeated on BBC Two in a 'BBC Four on Two' branded area, although this was often in a late night broadcast slot after Newsnight and has since been discontinued.
According to BARB the comedy panel game QI has the highest ratings of any show on BBC Four.[12]
At the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Four won the Non-Terrestrial Channel of the Year award in 2004 and 2006.
The channel's initial series of idents were generated dynamically reflecting the frequencies of the continuity announcers' voice or of backing music and were designed by Lambie-Nairn. As a result, no two idents were ever the same. The first continuity announcer was Zeb Soanes.
When the channel first started airing, it used the slogan "Everyone Needs A Place To Think", but the BBC stopped using this several months after the launch. However the BBC Four logo and above slogan can be found, engraved on benches along the South Bank in London, between the London Eye and Waterloo Bridge.
In September 2005, the channel began showing new idents comprising a central BBC Four logo surrounded by four quadrants which show different stages of the same footage thus making for a sort of optical illusion; for example, a swimming pool where a person on an inflatable ring appears in the bottom-left corner, though ripples don't enter the remaining quarters. Although the image appears as one at the start of the ident by the end it is clearly four separate images.
| Book: BBC Channels (UK) | |
| Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print. | |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||