Peter William Armstrong (born 1 April 1943) is a television and radio producer, whose career at the BBC spanned 25 years. He is best known for innovative religious programming and as the founder and project editor of the BBC's Domesday Project (1986), for which he won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2004 BAFTAs. He is the father of documentary maker

Franny Armstrong Franny Armstrong (born 3 February 1972) is a British documentary film director working for her own company, Spanner Films, and a former drummer with indie pop group The Band of Holy Joy. She is best known for three films: '' The Age of Stupid' ...

Educational background

Armstrong earned

First Class Honours The British undergraduate degree classification system is a grading structure for undergraduate degrees or bachelor's degrees and integrated master's degrees in the United Kingdom. The system has been applied (sometimes with significant variati ...

in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and continued doctorate studies at

Mansfield College, Oxford Mansfield College, Oxford is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in Oxford, England. The college was founded in Birmingham in 1838 as a college for Nonconformist students. It moved to Oxford in 1886 and was renamed Man ...

Professional background

Armstrong joined the BBC in 1971, after he was spotted by the then head of religious programming John Lang. He quickly moved from radio into television, founding well-known series like ''Everyman'', Songs of Praise, and ''Global Report'', as well as writing and producing one-off series and programmes including '' The Sea of Faith'', which led to the formation of the Sea of Faith movement. Armstrong was innovative in his approach to religious programming, insisting that, rather than viewing the world through the lens of faith, the programmes (''Everyman'' and ''Heart of the Matter'') would bring a journalist's eye to bear on the world's faith communities.

1986: The BBC Domesday Project

Inspired by the original

Domesday Book Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manus ...

, Peter Armstrong wondered if it would be possible to harness technology to recreate the philosophy of the Domesday Book, but applied to modern Britain. The resulting

BBC Domesday Project The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers, Philips, Logica, and the BBC (with some funding from the European Commission's ESPRIT programme) to mark the 900th anniversary of the original ''Domesday Book'', an 11th-centu ...

bought together millions of British citizens to produce an interactive record of the nation. He went on to create the award-winning Interactive Television Unit, and became its chair when it floated as the MultiMedia Corporation.

Oneworld.net

In 1995, Armstrong co-founded oneworld.net, the first internet portal devoted to global justice and development. Oneworld.net's central purpose was to act as a newswire for issues related to social justice – to aggregate and highlight the content of development NGOs such as Oxfam and

Christian Aid Christian Aid is the relief and development agency of 41 Christian (Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox) churches in the UK and Ireland, and works to support sustainable development, eradicate poverty, support civil society and provide disaster ...

. Oneworld joined Yahoo!'s world news platform in 2001 alongside newswires such as AP and

Reuters Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency was esta ...

. Sarah Wright,

Yahoo! News Yahoo! News is a news website that originated as an internet-based news aggregator by Yahoo!. The site was created by a Yahoo! software engineer named Brad Clawsie in August 1996. Articles originally came from news services such as the Associate ...

Editor, said "OneWorld journalists provide a unique and valuable resource to Yahoo by providing context for international headlines and voices from the front lines of international development." He also founded OneWorldTV and OneClimate, part of the OneWorld Network.

Awards

In 2004, Armstrong received a Lifetime Achievement BAFTA at the Interactive Awards for his contributions to interactive media. He was the second person to win this award, after

Tim Berners Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profes ...

, the inventor of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Armstrong, Peter William Alumni of Mansfield College, Oxford 1943 births Living people British television producers