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BBC Birmingham
BBC Birmingham is one of the oldest regional arms of the BBC, located in Birmingham. It was the first region outside London to start broadcasting both the corporation's radio (in 1922) and television (in 1949) transmissions, the latter from the Sutton Coldfield television transmitter. From 1971 BBC Birmingham was based at the Pebble Mill Studios, replacing studios on Broad Street, but in 2004 moved to the Mailbox facility in the city centre. Pebble Mill has been demolished to make way for a dental hospital and school of dentistry, which opened in 2016. BBC Birmingham is not to be confused with BBC Midlands, which is also based at the Mailbox. BBC Birmingham is the name of the Network Productions Centre in Birmingham making network programmes for television and radio. BBC Midlands is the regional operation providing news, current affairs and other regional programmes. Some departments within BBC Birmingham, such as factual programming, have been subject to review as part ...
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Midlands Light Orchestra
The Midlands (also referred to as Central England) are a part of England that broadly correspond to the Kingdom of Mercia of the Early Middle Ages, bordered by Wales, Northern England and Southern England. The Midlands were important in the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. They are split into the West Midlands and East Midlands. The region's biggest city, Birmingham often considered the social, cultural, financial and commercial centre of the Midlands, is the second-largest city and metropolitan area in the United Kingdom. Symbolism A saltire (diagonal cross) may have been used as a symbol of Mercia as early as the reign of Offa. By the 13th century, the saltire had become the attributed arms of the Kingdom of Mercia. The arms are blazoned ''Azure, a saltire Or'', meaning a gold (or yellow) saltire on a blue field. The saltire is used as both a flag and a coat of arms. As a flag, it is flown from Tamworth Castle, the ancient seat of the Mercian Kings, t ...
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Pebble Mill At One
''Pebble Mill at One'' is a British television magazine programme that was broadcast live on weekdays at one o'clock on BBC1, from 2 October 1972 to 23 May 1986, and again from 14 October 1991 to 29 March 1996. It was transmitted from the Pebble Mill studios of BBC Birmingham, and uniquely was hosted from the centre's main foyer area, rather than a conventional television studio. Broadcast Until 1972, broadcasting hours on British television were tightly controlled and limited by the British government. There were restrictions on the number of hours per day which could be used by the BBC and ITV for regular television programming. In the 1960s, it was set at a 50-hour allowance per week (with exemptions for schools programmes, adult education, state occasions, Welsh language programming, and outside broadcasts of sporting events) and gradually increased by the government at regular intervals. In 1972, the government – under Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath – announ ...
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Jean Anderson
Jean Anderson (12 December 1907 – 1 April 2001) was an English actress best remembered for her television roles as hard-faced matriarch Mary Hammond in the BBC drama '' The Brothers'' (1972–1976) and as rebellious aristocrat Lady Jocelyn "Joss" Holbrook in the Second World War series '' Tenko'' (1982–1985). She also had distinguished careers on stage and in 46 films. Early Life and Stage Mary Jean Heriot Anderson was born 12 December 1907 in Eastbourne, Sussex to Scottish parents, and grew up in Guildford, Surrey. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from 1926-1928. Her first professional engagement was in ''Many Waters'' at the Prince's Theatre, Bristol, in 1929 with her fellow RADA student Robert Morley. In 1934 she joined the Cambridge Festival Theatre, appearing in ''The Circle'' by Somerset Maugham and ''Yahoo'' by Lord Longford. In 1935 she played Lady Macbeth with The Seagull Players in Leeds. In 1936 Lord Longford's company from the Gate Theatre, Dub ...
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The Brothers (1972 TV Series)
''The Brothers'' is a British television series, produced and shown by the BBC between 1972 and 1976. Debuting with the death of road haulage magnate Robert Hammond, the series followed the trials and tribulations of the company and family/families he left behind, with equal shares in Hammond Transport Services left to each of his three sons and to his secretary (who was revealed to have been Hammond's mistress and the mother of his illegitimate daughter). Synopsis The series was based around conflict within the Hammond family over the direction of the family firm, a London-based road haulage business called Hammond Transport Services, after the death of patriarch Robert Hammond. The eldest son, Edward (played by Glyn Owen during the first series and by Patrick O'Connell for the remainder of the show's run), prepares to take over the running of the business, only to find that his father has left equal shares to his two other sons, Brian (Richard Easton), a dull accountant a ...
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Empire Road
An empire is a "political unit" made up of several territories and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the empire (sometimes referred to as the metropole) exercises political control over the peripheries. Within an empire, there is non-equivalence between different populations who have different sets of rights and are governed differently. Narrowly defined, an empire is a sovereign state whose head of state is an emperor; but not all states with aggregate territory under the rule of supreme authorities are called empires or ruled by an emperor; nor have all self-described empires been accepted as such by contemporaries and historians (the Central African Empire, and some Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in early England being examples). There have been "ancient and modern, centralized and decentralized, ultra-brutal and relatively benign" Empires. An important distinction has been between land empires mad ...
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BBC Two
BBC Two is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network owned and operated by the BBC. It covers a wide range of subject matter, with a remit "to broadcast programmes of depth and substance" in contrast to the more mainstream and popular BBC One. Like the BBC's other domestic TV and radio channels, it is funded by the television licence, and is therefore free of commercial advertising. It is a comparatively well-funded public-service network, regularly attaining a much higher audience share than most public-service networks worldwide. Originally styled BBC2, it was the third British television station to be launched (starting on 21 April 1964), and from 1 July 1967, Europe's first television channel to broadcast regularly in colour. It was envisaged as a home for less mainstream and more ambitious programming, and while this tendency has continued to date, most special-interest programmes of a kind previously broadcast on BBC Two, for example the BBC Proms, no ...
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Second City Firsts
''Second City Firsts'' is a British drama anthology series of single plays, broadcast by the BBC, all lasting thirty minutes. Recorded at BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham, or sometimes filmed on location, the series was broadcast between 1973 and 1978. The series title referred both to Pebble Mill's location in England's Second City, and the fact that the series commissioned an unprecedented amount of first-time writers.Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography
ed. Helen Wheatley, pp.91-92
The 1974 episode ''Girl'', about a



Thirty-Minute Theatre
''Thirty-Minute Theatre'' was a British anthology drama series of short plays shown on BBC Television between 1965 and 1973, which was used in part at least as a training ground for new writers, on account of its short running length, and which therefore attracted many writers who later became well known. It was produced initially by Harry Moore, later by Graeme MacDonald, George Spenton-Foster, Innes Lloyd and others. ''Thirty-Minute Theatre'' began on BBC2 in 1965 with an adaptation of the black comedy ''Parson's Pleasure'' (author, Roald Dahl). Dennis Potter contributed ''Emergency – Ward 9'' (1966), which he partially recycled in the much later ''The Singing Detective'' (1986). In 1967 BBC2 launched the UK's first colour service, with the consequence that ''Thirty-Minute Theatre'' became the first drama series in the country to be shown in colour. As well as single plays, the series showed several linked collections of plays, including a group of four plays by John Mortimer ...
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Play For Today
''Play for Today'' is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were (with a few exceptions noted below) between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration. A handful of these plays, including '' Rumpole of the Bailey'', subsequently became television series in their own right. History The strand was a successor to ''The Wednesday Play'', the 1960s anthology series, the title being changed when the day of transmission moved to Thursday to make way for a sport programme. Some works, screened in anthology series' on BBC2, like Willy Russell's ''Our Day Out'' (1977), were repeated on BBC1 in the series. The producers of ''The Wednesday Play'', Graeme MacDonald and Irene Shubik, transferred to the new series. Shubik continued with the series until ...
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Boys From The Blackstuff
''Boys from the Blackstuff'' is a British drama television series of five episodes, originally transmitted from 10 October to 7 November 1982 on BBC2. The serial was written by Liverpudlian playwright Alan Bleasdale, as a sequel to a television play titled ''The Black Stuff''. The British Film Institute described it as a "seminal drama series... a warm, humorous but ultimately tragic look at the way economics affect ordinary people… TV's most complete dramatic response to the Thatcher era and as a lament to the end of a male, working class British culture." ''The Black Stuff'' The television play ''The Black Stuff'' was originally written by Bleasdale and directed by Jim Goddard for BBC1's ''Play for Today'' anthology series in 1978. After filming however, the play was not transmitted until 2 January 1980. It concerned a group of Liverpudlian tarmac layers (hence the slang for tarmac: 'the black stuff') on a job near Middlesbrough. The acclaim that ''The Black Stuff'' recei ...
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David Rose (producer)
David Edward Rose (22 November 1924 – 26 January 2017) was a British television producer and commissioning editor. At the BBC Following war service flying on 34 missions in Lancaster bombers, he trained as an actorInterview
Theatre Archive Project, British Library, 21 October 2005, p.1
at the Guildhall School of Drama, but following graduation pursued a career in stage management. He became an Assistant Floor Manager for BBC television in LondonInterview
Theatre Archive Project, British Library, 21 October 2005, p.5
in 1954,
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