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.[1]
BBC Birmingham is not to be confused with BBC Midlands, which is also based at the Mailbox. While 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 of a wider restructuring process. Much of the factual department, making programmes such as Countryfile, has been moved to either Bristol, Salford or other BBC offices.[2]
Buildings
The British Broadcasting Company's first Birmingham radio station, 51T, initially broadcast from temporary premises at Witton in November 1922, before moving the following year to a former cinema on New Street.[3] The transmitter was located at Birmingham City Council's Summer Lane electricity generating station.[3]
In 1926, they moved to a custom-built, two-storey studio building in Broad Street, which was opened on 20 January.[3] The main studio, at 45 by, was then the largest in the country.[3]
Subsequently, several converted buildings across the city were used for the BBC's operations in Birmingham. At some point after the Second World War the BBC took over the headquarters of the Birmingham Royal Institution for the Blind, a very large collection of buildings in Carpenter Road, Edgbaston.
Notable historical BBC Birmingham productions
Drama
In the 1970s and 1980s, BBC Birmingham was home to the English Regions Drama Department, established in 1971, and headed by the senior BBC producer David Rose. Its remit was to produce programmes set in various regions of England in order to provide balance to the output from London.
Among the department's perhaps best known productions are Boys from the Blackstuff (1982); Play for Today – The Fishing Party; contributions to Thirty-Minute Theatre; and a series of plays by new writers, called Second City Firsts, produced by Peter Ansorge and Tara Prem, which aired on BBC2. The unit also produced the first BBC Television drama with a predominantly black and Asian cast, Empire Road (1978–79) also on BBC2. The long-running Sunday evening series The Brothers (1972–79), which starred Jean Anderson, was also a fixture at the studios.
Pebble Mill at One
BBC Birmingham used the main foyer of its Pebble Mill building for the early afternoon television magazine programme Pebble Mill at One, which ran from 1972 until 1986 and raised the profile of the studios to something of a national institution. The idea to use the foyer came about because of a lack of other studio space.
Current BBC Birmingham productions
BBC Birmingham output has steadily diminished over time as production has moved elsewhere with the closure of Pebble Mill and the development of other BBC sites. Doctors was produced at the BBC Drama Village in Selly Oak, but was cancelled in 2024, and The Archers is produced for BBC Radio 4. For afternoon broadcast after Doctors, Father Brown and Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators are current BBC Birmingham productions whereas The Afternoon Play, Land Girls, WPC 56, and The Coroner are former productions. The closure of the Factual Unit in 2012 [8] meant no factual programmes outside of regional output are produced in Birmingham.
The Midlands contributes the highest portion of the BBC's revenue through licence fees (£942 million) yet has the second lowest amount of BBC spending in the region, after Northern Ireland. This equates to "91% of Midland BBC licence fees spent elsewhere".[9]
Regional output
As with all other BBC regions, BBC Birmingham is responsible for providing local radio services and the regional television news broadcasts on BBC One during the times when all regions opt out of the network feed to provide their own local news programming, which in the BBC Birmingham area is called Midlands Today.
BBC Midlands Today is broadcast from in the Mailbox in Birmingham, and is the regional news for:
BBC Radio WM also broadcasts from the Mailbox studios; it provides local radio to Birmingham, West Midlands, the Black Country, and southern Staffordshire.
- Herefordshire
- Worcestershire
- Warwickshire
- West Midlands
- Shropshire
- Staffordshire
- Northern Oxfordshire
- Northern Gloucestershire
See also
- BBC Asian Network
- Sue Beardsmore
- Ashley Blake
- Carl Chinn
- Sonia Deol
- Ed Doolan
- David Gregory-Kumar
- Kay Alexander
- Nick Owen
- Shefali Oza
- Satnam Rana
- Suzanne Virdee
- Adil Ray
- Peter Sissons
- Adam Yosef
- Michael Buerk
External links
References
- Birmingham University^
- Tara Conlan. BBC mulls departure from White City The Guardian, 5 October 2011^
- Birmingham's New Studio Amateur Wireless, 30 January 1926^