It was launched on 2 March 2002[1] and shows a wide variety of programmes including arts, documentaries, music, international film and drama, and current affairs.

As a result, BBC Four broadcasts from 19:00 to around 04:00 each night, with an hour's down-time and promotions for CBeebies before the start of that channel's schedule.

It should provide an ambitious range of innovative, high quality programming that is intellectually and culturally enriching, taking an expert and in-depth approach to a wide range of subjects.The first evening's BBC Four programmes were simulcast on BBC Two,[1] with the first programme being The Man Who Destroyed Everything, a documentary about conceptual artist Michael Landy and his installation Break Down.

[34] BBC Four was also notable for first showing Larry David's Seinfeld follow-up, Curb Your Enthusiasm,[35] Armando Iannucci's cutting political satire, The Thick of It, The Chaser's War on Everything, Flight of the Conchords, Mad Men and Danish thriller The Killing.

The channel broadcasts a mixture of art and science documentaries, vintage drama (including many rare black-and-white programmes), and non-English-language productions such as films from the Artificial Eye catalogue, the French thriller Spiral and the Swedish detective series Wallander.

The channel is also home to many political travel shows such as Holidays in the Axis of Evil which features investigative journalism.

[39] Another notable production was a live re-make of the 1953 science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment, adapted from the original scripts into a single, two-hour version (though on the night it underran considerably, lasting less than 1 hour 40 minutes), broadcast on the evening of Saturday 2 April 2005.

[citation needed] Another notable programme broadcast on BBC Four is Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe which contains reviews of current shows, as well as stories and commentary on how television is produced.

[41] At the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Four won the Non-Terrestrial Channel of the Year award in 2004, 2006 and 2012.

[43] As of 2023, BBC Four schedules still feature music programming (such as Top of the Pops and Neil Brand's documentaries) on a Friday night,[44] with drama imports on a Saturday (but not always foreign-language productions like Italian crime drama Inspector Montalbano)[45][46] and usually an hour of 'archive' programmes (such as those by Bob Ross[47] and Fred Dibnah)[48][49][50] starting off the weekday schedule at 7pm.

[51][52] In addition to these programmes, many hour long regional documentaries such as BBC Scotland's Rigs of Nigg,[53][54][55][56][57] about the 1970s North Sea oil drilling platform construction industry based around the Cromarty Firth, also received their national debut on the channel.

[60][61] The following is a list of the ten most watched broadcasts on BBC Four since launch, based on Live +7 data supplied by BARB.

BBC Four is widely available on cable, IPTV and digital satellite television in the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

[74][75] The channel's initial series of idents were generated dynamically reflecting the frequencies of the continuity announcers' voice or of backing music and were designed by Lambie-Nairn.

When the channel first started airing, it used the slogan "Everybody Needs A Place To Think", but the BBC stopped using this several months after the launch.

On 10 September 2005, the channel began showing new idents comprising a central BBC Four logo surrounded by four quadrants which show different stages of the same footage thus making for a sort of optical illusion; for example, a swimming pool where a person on an inflatable ring appears in the bottom-left corner, though ripples don't enter the remaining quarters.

These were the longest-running idents ever used by the BBC - they lasted until the channel's rebrand in 2021, however, the "quadrants" theme continues to this day.

In March 2019, BBC Four added several new idents inspired by "oddly satisfying videos" in tandem with the quadrants theme, originally premiering for a programme season honouring the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web.