Tv in britain

The first television in Britain appeared more than 50 years ago and nowadays is very popular. Every family has at least one TV set, the number of colour sets in use is very large, though they are not cheap.

The BBC was the first to provide a public television service in 1936. During the Second World War the transmissions were stopped, but were resumed in 1946. In 1952, the ceremony of Elizabeth's II coronation was transmitted all over the country.

The BBC provides two channels. Besides BBC-I and BBC-II there are two Independent Channels. The viewers now have four channels at their disposal, and are able to watch television for many hours a day. They can watch plays, live transmissions of important events, sports games and competi­tions, interviews with prominent people, musical performances and many other items. News is broadcast regularly by all the channels and watched by most people. Films are often televised, and many of them are made specially for television.

A lot of people prefer staying home and watching TV rather than going out to cinemas, and many cinemas have closed. Most of the programmes present serious and instructive matters, such as family and children problems, problems of social work and employment as well as religious programmes.

Part of the time on Independent television is devoted to advertising, but its amount is small and strictly limited by the special Act that allowed commercial television. One of the features of TV programmes is that they often show violence, murder, crimes and gunplay, which is frequently criticized by the viewers. On the whole television plays as important role in the life of the British people as newspapers.

THE BRITISH PRESS

The British are great newspaper readers. They look through newspapers at breakfast, read papers on their way to work, on the bus, on the train and when they come home in the evening.

The British press consists of several kinds of newspapers. There are national and local, morning and evening newspapers; there are daily, weekly and special Sunday papers. There are national papers that are sold all over the country with a large circulation. They give general news and are published in London. There are two main types of national papers — the "popular" papers and the "quality" papers. The popular papers are smaller in size with lots of pictures and big headlines which are designed to catch the eye of the reader. They offer their readers different short stories, crime reports, cartoons and advertisements. They are easy to read and often contain little real information. Examples of this type of papers are "The Daily Mail," "The Sun" and "The Daily Mirror."

"Quality" papers appeal to the more serious reader, who wants to read about politics and foreign affairs. These papers, such as "The Daily Telegraph," "The Times" and "The Guardian" are bigger in size with longer articles and wider coverage of events. They have different pages for home news, foreign affairs, feature articles, fashion, business, sport and so on.

Средства массовой информации

The Sunday papers have a higher circulation than the dailies, they are larger than the daily papers and usually con­tain more articles dealing with general information.

Regional or local papers are published in towns and areas outside London, and mostly cover the local news.

There is no censorship of the press in Britain, though all papers are responsible for what they publish.