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►Inside Men

BBC 4-part drama about three men working a security depot and decide to rob it.

►One Night

Set over one blisteringly hot summer's night when nerves are frayed and tensions ride high, the BBC’s One Night is the story of four ordinary people whose fates are linked by a seemingly inconsequential event.

Buy the DVD of the programme from Amazon

Pages on popular quality drama television series and one-off dramas:

Bouquet of Barbed Wire

Crimzon Petal & The White

Inspector George Gently

Lark Rise to Candleford

Series currently on telly: Call The Midwife Eternal Law Hustle Law & Order: UK Sherlock Wild At Heart

The Suspicions of Mr W

Taggart

Torchwood: Miracle Day

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Angels practicing law - Whatever next?

The Inside Men are after the money

The con is on again in the new series of Hustle

Danny Trevanion and Du Plessis are still chasing the dream

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BBC2 started in 1964 and introduced a new improved service with better quality pictures created from 625 lines. This replaced the old standard of 405 lines in black and white, and paved the way for colour transmission that started in 1967 on BBC2.

BBC 4 commenced as a cable and satellite channel in March 2002 followed by BBC3 on the same platforms from February 2003.

History of ITV

Independent Television was created by the Television Act 1954. The act set up the Independent Television Authority to control the areas - London, the Midlands and North of England. The ITV regions were launched in September 1955, February 1956 and May 1956 respectively.

ITV is franchised and there have been a number of changes over the years. In 1962 there were 13 regional ITV companies.

Since the Broadcasting Act 1990 the number of ITV regions has reduced significantly. Recently, Yorkshire Television acquired Tyne Tees Televisin in 1992 to create Yorkshire-Tyne Tees Television and they merged with Granada Television in 1997. Granada and Carlton merged in 2004 to create ITV plc.

The ITV regions initially broadcast on 405-line VHF in black and white. They converted to colour and 625 line UHF on 15th November 1969 at the same time as BBC1 and some two years after BBC2. The new system was spread over the regions over a period of time and was not completed until 1976 when the Channel Islands were the last region to be converted. The old 405 line service was phased out between 1982 and 1985.

History of Channel 4

Channel 4 is a British public service television broadcaster that started broadcasts on 2nd November 1982 and is ultimately publicly owned although it is self-funded through commercials.

It was originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority but is now owned by the Channel Four Television Corporation which stared in 1993.

It was introduced to established to break the duopoly of the BBC and ITV and has broadcast the same programmes across a terrestrial network that gives coverage over the whole of the UK.

Channel 4 operates from Cardiff covering Wales with a service called S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru) with programming aimed at the Welsh-speaking audience. The analogue service is bilingual with the digital service being 100% Welsh-language. The digital service is called S4C Digital (S4C Digidol).

History of Five

Five us the fifth national terrestrial television channel and was launched as Channel 5 on 30th March 1997. It rebranded as Five on 16th September 2002.

The channel is owned by Channel 5 Broadcasting Limited which is 64% owned by RTL Group (a group of publishers of which Bertelsmann is the largest) and 29% by the publishing group United Business Media.

History of Satellite

The main satellite broadcaster in the UK is Sky Digital which is a subscription based service run by British Sky Broadcasting. It was formed by the merger of Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting in 1990. The merger was the result of both TV services suffering huge losses. Sky Television plc was a 4 channel satellite TV service launched on 5th February 1989 by Rupert Murdoch’s News International. It carries over 600 TV channels.

The other two major services in the UK are Freesat and Freeview. Freesat is a free alternative which started in May 2008. It is run jointly by BBC and ITV and has 140 channels. Freeview is run jointly by BBC, Arqiva, ITV, Channel 4 and SDN and carries 48 channels.

Cable

Cable television has been around for a long time as a company called Rediffusion distributed the fledgling TV BBC services by cable back in 1932. At the time the broadcast signals were weak and cable was a more reliable delivery system. Rediffusion (and other services) set up networks on the fringes of the BBC transmission areas. By the late 1970s, two and a half million British homes received their television service by cable. The services consolidated over time and by the early 2000s only two major companies remained: NTL and Telewest.

On 3rd March 2006 the companies merged into NTL incorporated and when NTL acquired Virgin Mobile, the enterprise rebranded as Virgin Media.

Homepage ►History of UK Television

The History of UK Television

History of the BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation operates under a royal charter granted by the British monarch. In common with a number of European broadcasting networks it is funded by an annual licence fee.

It was originally the British Broadcasting Company and was founded in 1922 by a group of six telecommunications companies—Marconi, Radio Communication Company, Metropolitan-Vickers, General Electric, Western Electric, and British Thomson-Houston. At the time it was only broadcasting radio programmes.

The Company, with John Reith as general manager, became the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927 when it was granted a Royal Charter (this expires in July 2017) of incorporation. The Corporation adopted the coat of arms and its famous motto "Nation shall speak peace unto Nation."

Experimental television programmes began in 1932 but a proper service did not commence until 1936.