London:
Here are some key figures related to the broadcasting giant the BBC, which will mark the centenary of its founding on October 18.
Here are some amazing facts about the BBC in numbers:
2: The number of times the first news bulletin was read on the air in November 1922, once at normal speed, once twice as slow, asking listeners for their preference.
10: The amount in shillings (half a pound) of the BBC license fee when it was introduced in 1923 to help fund the broadcaster. The fee, which must be paid by every household with a television, now stands at 159 pounds ($176). The Conservative government, arguing that the BBC’s funding model must change to reflect a shift to streaming services, is considering scrapping it.
12: The number of times the famously combative BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman asked the same question of Home Secretary Michael Howard (“did you threaten to overrule him?”) in May 1997, while horrified at a controversy involving the head of the prison service .
33: Speeches by Prime Minister Winston Churchill on BBC radio to bring the nation together during World War II, including his famous “we will fight on the beaches” speech.
42: Languages in which the BBC broadcasts around the world — an important part of British soft power since the 1932 launch of the BBC World Service, then known as the Empire Service. Faced with a funding freeze, it has been forced to cut its production, with Chinese, Hindi and Arabic among the nine languages it has proposed to cut from its radio broadcasts as part of a move to a “digital- first” model.
71: For years, the world’s longest-running radio drama, “The Archers”, has been broadcast on the BBC. The wildly popular soap opera about a farming community in the fictional village of Ambridge was created to increase agricultural yields after World War II. Since then, it has become a benchmark of British popular culture, with storylines increasingly following the evolution of society, from the arrival of a female pastor in 1996 to a same-sex marriage in 2006.
517: Number of times Franck Bauer, a presenter of the BBC’s French-language radio station Radio Londres, addressed Nazi-occupied France from London during World War II, starting with, “This is London, the French speaking to the French.” Charles de Gaulle used the station with his famous appeal on June 18, 1940 to the French to join the resistance in London.
2,000,000: The number of people who have graduated thanks to the Open University, which started in the early 1970s with the BBC to beam lectures into the living rooms of people who wanted to continue studying at home. Now most of the content is offered online.
21,000,000: Number of people around the world who watched the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II on BBC television in 1953 – the first major event to be televised.
22,400,000: Number of people who have seen BBC coverage of the Queen’s coffin taken from Westminster Abbey through the streets of London after her funeral on 19 September. Britain’s longest-reigning monarch died on September 8 at the age of 96.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
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