Текст 11 Radio and Television

In 1936 the government established the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to provide a public service in radio. Since then the BBC has been most affected by the invention of television, which changed the entertainment habits of the nation, and the establishment of independent and commercial radio and television, which removed the BBC's broadcasting monopoly. In spite of its much reduced evening, audience, BBC radio still provides an im­portant service. Its five radio stations pro­vide (1) non-stop pop music; (2) light en­tertainment; (3) minority interests, e. g. classical music, arts programmes and aca­demic material (some for Open University courses), cricket commentating in the summer months; (4) news and comment and discussion programmes; (5) sport and edu­cation. The BBC additionally runs thirty-seven local radio stations, providing mate­rial of local interest. There are also seventy: independent local radio stations which pro-; vide news, information, music and other entertainment, coverage of local events, sports commentary, chat shows and 'phone-in' programmes. The latter provide an im­portant counselling service to isolated, ag­grieved or perplexed people.

An important but separate part of the BBC's work is its external services, essen­tially the BBC World Service and its broadcasts in thirty-five vernacular languages.

These are funded separately from the rest of the BBC, by money from the Foreign Office. In other words, although the BBC has freedom in the content of what it broadcasts, the government decides in which foreign languages it should broadcast, and the amount of funding it should receive. In this way the service is a promotional part of British foreign policy. In 1990 research showed that the BBC World Service en­joyed an audience of approximately 120 million listeners, who were predominantly young (aged between 25 and 35) and male. The strength of the BBC's external services has been the provision of relatively objec­tive and impartial news and comment to listeners in countries where local censor­ship exists.

Television is the single most popular form of entertainment in Britain. In the late 1980s the average adult spent twenty-five hours, and children eighteen hours, in front of the television set each week. They had four channels to choose from: BBC1 and BBC2, ITV (Independent Television) and Channel Four. Channel Four, which was established in 1982, specialises in minority interest programmes, but has proved highly successful. BBC television derives its in­come from the annual license fee for television, while ITV and Channel Four are financed solely through advertising. Coro­nation Street, ITV's most watched show, attracts advertising worth ten times the cost of making the programme.

The strength of British television lies in its high quality. "Go anywhere in the world," one leading political journalist has written, "and British television is an object of envy and admiration... The reason lies in the quality of its innovation and its willingness to experiment. For example, British television enthusiastically took the Muppet Show, when its creator, Jim Henson, had been rejected by the American networks. In the fields of TV documentary comedy and satire, or drama, British tele­vision is a world leader.