BBC Four is a BBC television channel available to digital TV (Freeview, satellite and cable) viewers in the UK.

Overview

BBC Four is arguably one of the highest quality channels on British television, winning the Non-Terrestrial Channel of the Year award at the 2004 Edinburgh International Television Festival . Its first slogan was "everybody needs a place to think", intended to capture the concept of a channel with high quality original programming.

History

BBC Four is the successor to an earlier digital channel called BBC Knowledge. It began broadcasting on March 2 2002 spending an evening simulcasting with BBC TWO.

Programming

The channel broadcasts a mixture of art and science-related documentaries, archive drama (including many rare black and white programmes), and non-English language films.

On weekdays the channel shows a 30 minute global news programme called The World, simulcast with and produced by BBC World. It screens a huge number of original documenties such as Century Of The Self and The Trial of Henry Kissenger .

Drama has given the channel its most popular programmes, with The Alan Clark Diaries (2003) producing the record audience figure to date, over 800,000 viewers. A notable recent production was a live re-make of the 1953 science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment, adapted from the original scripts into a single, updated two-hour version, 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, and gained BBC Four its second highest ever viewing figure of 482,000.

Broadcast method

On the Freeview digital terrestrial platform BBC Four is broadcast in a statistically multiplexed 10 Megabit stream in Multiplex 1 that shares its bandwidth with the CBeebies channel.

External link

• BBC Four website